The effect of the writing speed on the quality of a burn is an issue that has been discussed many times in the past. As the writing speed increases, it is more difficult for a drive to make perfect burns. That's why Pioneer introduced the Optimal Writing Speed Technology. Its main purpose is to change the writing speed of every burn to the highest level at which the drive is able burn with decent quality.

In detail, the OWS technology, supported by the Pioneer DVR-116D drive, is based on a lookup table residing on the firmware of the drive which contains information about every MID and its corresponding Optimal Writing Speed with the selected drive.

To enable the OWS for a burn, we have to run the OWS utility, check the "ENABLE" radio button and click "Apply", without having any disc mounted on the drive.

We also have the option of storing the optimal writing speed for each disc on the drive's memory. This would allow the drive to burn at the Optimal Write Speed, without running the OWS utility before. This is done by checking "Saves optimal writing speed setting to drive" checkbox.

Also, if you click the button "Check setting", the utility will inform you of the current state of the OWS technology (whether it is on or off).

So, the Optimal Write Speed technology promises to offer good burns with the cost of low speed. Let's see in the following tests if it is going to help.