BTC DRW1008IM DVD±RW recorder - Page 14

Conclusion

Overall, the BTC drive performed satisfactorily and appears to be a reliable, quality recorder. The reading speeds for CD/DVD were rather good. Although we estimate that the 6x reading for DVD+RW and DVD-RW is low and could be faster. The seek times were acceptable with CD media but they could be better with DVD media.

The error correction for Audio CDs was very good. The drive returned low loudness and muting sample errors with no samples skipped. In the DVD error correction tests, the BTC drive performed excellently. All of our test DVDs played succesfully from the drive without any errors reported. The drive just ignored the defeactive areas on those discs.

In the protected disc tests, the BTC drive had good behaviour, although the drive cannot make SafeDisc v2.9 working backups, however all previous versions are supported. The drive is also very fast ripping with all the game types we tried.

From the DAE test that we carried out we fell that the drive's response could be better. The drive can read fast Audio CD's but the average speed in the advanced DAE quality test were rather low, only 21x. Plus the fact that the drive didn't manage to play/rip the CDS200 protected Audio CD.

In the writing test the drive performed well, with low times recorded. The only concern was that accasionally the "buffer underrun was avoided" error messsage popped up. The drive also supports up to 96min overburning.

From the quality measurement tests that we carried out, the drive reported very low jitter values at all recording speeds and with all the media brands. Only with Hi-Space media some C2 error were reported, but in our opinion this cannot deter from the drive's very good performance, among the best we have seen for these tests.

In the DVD recording tests we would like to see the writing speed beginning at 6x rather than 4x, and the duration with 6x writing to be less. Apart from this the drive performed well without errors. The recording quality for DVD media was good, according to KProbe measurements.

BTC will plans to release a Bit Setting software for the drive in order to achieve better compatibility for the DVD+R/+RW format.

BTC DRW1008IM is available in the market at a price of 140-130 Euros, depending on your area. The price is quite competitive, although you will possibly need some extra searching over the net to find it at this price.