Artec VPP-8D24Q - Page 13

Conclusion

The drive is a good and fast CD/DVD reader with high reading speeds for both CD and DVD media and seek times, which while acceptable, could be faster.

The CD error correction is good with both ABEX TCD-721R and ABEX TCD-726. We venture to say that although the drive performed well, the final score should have been higher. This is due to the 83.6 score for the 726 test disc, which is not the best we have had. As for its performance with the CD-Check Audio Test Disc, we can characterize it as better than average where it read 4 out of 5 for the fourth track, and failing to read the fifth track, which is difficult for all but the best drives.

In the DVD error correction tests, the Artec drive had very good performance. It managed to read accurately all of our test discs without reporting any read error. No matter what the scratch or the defect, the drive managed to read the disc.

One of the disappointments was the inability to backup protected games. This is definitely not the strong point of the drive.

Fortunately, the audio protections, such as CDS200 and Key2Audio, were not a problem for the drive which also had good and accurate performance in the DAE tests.

According to our writing tests, performance with 10X for rewritable CD media is low. Apart from this, the most important thing is that the drive did not confirm the manufacturer's specifications for 4X DVD-R recording, producing 2.4X CLV for this format. Maybe with the release of a firmware upgrade, that we believe may already exist, this will change. Another strange thing however, is that our written RW media had problems. For the minus format, the discs could not be read with most drives, so we didn't manage to measure their writing quality, while for the plus format, CDSpeed reported unrecovered read errors.

The CD writing quality of the drive is one the strong points. While recording at 12x will yield reasonable quality, we recommended using 16x and 24x instead, where low jitter levels will give much better quality. All of the media brands we tested confirmed this.

As for the DVD writing quality, in general it was good. There were some cases of increased PI/PO, but with most media the levels were very good. We still have a question mark hanging over the -RW format, where the disc could not be read with the LiteOn drive (and not only).

We would like to add, that the booktype management from BenQ is working properly with the drive. So, very simply and easily, you can change from the DVD+R to DVD-ROM format for highest compatibility.

The drive, already available on the market, is priced from $75~$109.

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