BTC DRW1108IM DVD±RW recorder - Page 14

Conclusion

The BTC 1108IM performed extremely well, with low seek times in the CD reading tests. However it was disappointing in the error correction tests where we had expected better performance.

As for DVD reading, the BTC is fast with both recordable and pressed media. The seek times are rather low and the error correction capabilities are good. Despite the fact that it had to lower speed in order to read the defective area of our ABEX TDV-541 disc, the drive managed to playback all of our other test discs without reporting any errors or problems.

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

According to the DAE test, the drive returned good performance only with the Key2Audio protection scheme. With CDS200 protected Audio CDs, the drive recognizes the disc but cannot play or rip the contents*. The drive also failed to play our 99 minute AudioCDs, fortunately, this wasn't the case with the 90min CDs.

With CD recording tests, the BTC drive did not perform as well as we had hoped. The supported 40x maximum writing speed is high enough for a DVD burner but the writing quality wasn`t good with all media brands we used, at 40x speed. Here we would like to mention that it may be better to avoid recording at 32x and 40x speeds as the drive did not present good results. The truth is that such high recording, as at 40x, always has increased litter levels. We believe that with a firmware upgrade this will be fixed.

According to our tests the drive failed at the overburning tests, even though we tried with normal CD-R (700MB), 90min (800MB) and 99min (880MB). After flashing the drive with the latest firmware,B218, we managed to overburn up to 96min.

The DVD recording tests went a little better, where the drive performed well having high compatibility with all media formats*. The PI/PO levels were low in most cases. Only with DVD+RW media the levels were increased. This was a strong feature of the BTC drive.

At the time of this review, the drive wasn`t available on the market so it is not possible to make a price/performance evaluation.

*July 19 2004, the new firmware release vB028 fixed the CDS200 problem and also matched more media.