SAMSUNG SH-W08A DVD±R/RW recorder - Page 15

Conclusion

The Samsung drive performed well with low seek times in the CD reading tests, although full seeks were a little high. The error correction test results showed better than an average performance.

DVD reading is fast with both recordable and pressed media, along with good seek times. The drive further displayed very good error correction capabilities with the defective discs. The drive managed to playback all of our test discs without reporting any errors or problems, which means strong DVD error correction capability.

The drive managed to make partial working backups of all our protected games CDs. All the backups were playable with the same drive but not in others drives, at least for the latest SafeDisk versions. The drive also gave us acceptable ripping times for all game titles we tried.

The Samsung returned good performance only with the CDS200 protection scheme while with Key2Audio protection, the drive recognizes the disc but cannot play or rip the contents. It could play our 99min AudioCD but had some reading problems with the 90min CD, during the last tracks.

Writing with the Samsung drive CDs we had nice write quality with three out of the five various media we used. The drive has compatibility problems with MAM media as it burns them at 16x maximum speed and we also suggest avoiding Traxdata 52x media with this drive as it gave us the highest jitter results and C2 errors. The Samsung drive also failed to overburn CD-R (700MB), 90min (800MB) and 99min (880MB). We expect that all this will be fixed with a new firmware upgrade.

DVD recording revealed that the drive has low media compatibility. Certified famous 8X media were recorded at 4X. Maybe a firmware upgrade will fix this also. As for the recording quality, the results speak for themselves, where we were unable to measure half of the media brands used. However, from what media we did manage to measure, we estimate that there were many cases where the PI/PO levels were increased.

The drive aptly priced at about $92.