The AEC-1000 consists of a DVD Drive and the "ALChecker" error measurement application which can check the written data quality. The application is capable of 1X CLV measurement as well as 4X CLV on DVD-Video/ROM and finalized DVD+R/-R media.

There are three measurement modes:

• Fine Mode: checks a series of eight consecutive ECC blocks,
• Rough Mode: checks eight consecutive ECC blocks every 100h ECC blocks
• Quick Mode: checks three specified areas

The checking status is shown graphically in real time while you can save the error graph at the end of the test. The reported errors are the PI and the UncPO. In the case of PI, it counts the number of rows corrected by the PI error correction in each group of eight consecutive ECC blocks. In the case of UncPO, it counts the number of ECC blocks in which more than one byte is uncorrectable in eight consecutive ECC blocks. For our quality scans, we set it for 1X CLV and Fine Mode which is the slowest and with the safest results. Also, we chose to measure all the media burned at the maximum available writing speed, namely 16X.

• Ricoh 16X DVD+R @ 16X

• RiDisc 16X DVD+R @ 16X

• CMC Magnetics 16X DVD-R @ 16X

• Verbatim 16X DVD-R @ 16X

- Summary

We chose to use the Almedio DVD checker to further investigate writing quality at the 16x burning speed. Any DVD+R we tested came up with very good results. On the other hand, Verbatim DVD-R 16x media reported uncorrectable errors. The Almedio checker is considered to be more reliable that the Plextools scans. However, it should be noted that the overall performance of the burner was very good compared with other devices available on the market with similar specifications. For example, the NEC ND-3530A's quality performance was not as good as the BenQ DW1640.