- CD Format

The Philips drive supports up to 48X reading speed for CD media, and 40X for rewritable.

The Philips DVDR1648P has very good reading speeds, confirmed by CDSpeed and it seems to be the fastest among the three drives.

- DVD Format

The speed reported by all three burners showed no significant differences between the drives with the Philips DVDR1648P reporting the highest speeds.

The two layers of a PTP DVD-ROM disc are read sequentially with the drive starting reading from the inner part of the disc, which is the beginning of each layer, progressing towards the outer range for each layer. Not a lot between the drives but this time, the Pioneer drive has the highest reading speeds.

The first layer of an OTP dual layer DVD-ROM is read exactly the same way as the first layer of the PTP disc we tested previously. The difference here is the reading strategy of the second layer on the disc. The beginning of the second layer is located in the outer part of the disc, so the drive starts reading from the outer tracks towards the inner part of the disc. As with the PTP DL disc, the Pioneer drive is slightly faster than the Philips and NEC drives.

In this reading test, the NEC drive proves fastest, especially with -/+R media. The Philips DVDR1648P offers consistent reading speeds with all four media.

Although the Pioneer drive reported the highest ripping speed, Philips is also very fast with DVD-Video DL discs while the NEC drive offered average performance.

-Appendix

Nero CD-DVD Speed Graphs

• CD Pressed / CD-R / US-RW
• DVD Pressed SL / DVD Pressed DL PTP / DVD Pressed DL OTP / DVD-R / DVD-RW / DVD+R / DVD+RW