TOSHIBA SD-R5272 DVD±RW recorder - Page 14

Conclusion

The drive's CD reading ability is good with relatively low seek times. The CD error correction is satisfactory but we would like it to be better.

As for DVD reading, the Toshiba drive was fast with both recordable and pressed media. The seek times were rather low. The drive's DVD error correction ability is excellent. Only the ABEX TDV-541 disc presented some minor problems, where the drive had to lower speed in order to read the defective areas, otherwise, it managed to playback all of our test discs without reporting any errors.

The drive managed to make working backups of protected CDs, having fast ripping times with all game types we tried.

According to the DAE test, the drive had slow speed while it was also slow for on the flay copying. The drive supports the Cactus Data Shield 200 protection scheme. With the Key2Audio protected disc, the drive could not recognize the disc and of course rip or play the contents. SD-S5272 reported some minor problems when it came to playing the 90 minute AudioCDs. This wasn't the case with the 99min CD.

In the CD recording tests, the Toshiba drive performed very well. The supported 32x maximum writing speed is high enough for a DVD burner. However we would prefer to see the writing speed for CD-RW media to be 24x rather than 16x. Also, the CD writing quality was high, with all media brands we used. From our tests, we would recommend that it would be better to avoid recording at 4x speed, as at this speed the drive did not return the best results.

In the DVD recording tests, the drive performed admirably with high compatibility with all media formats, except with MAM media where it was impossible to read it, even with the Toshiba drive itself. Also, it recorded at 8x speed with many DVD+/-R brands which supported 1-4x writing. The PI/PO levels were low, in most cases. This is a strong point of the Toshiba SD-R5272.

Concluding, we can say that the drive had very good performance and it will prove to be a very competitive drive. Toshiba has done a very good job here and we welcome this effort. With an approximatelly €100 price tag, the SD-R5272 gained our respect and deserves the Editor's Choice Award.