Joint Round Robin Test for Recordable DVD's Seminar

This year , there were many addition to the Joint Round Robin tests, like 8x DVD-R media, 4x DVD-RW media and 5x DVD-RAM media related products. There is a total of 142 products of 54 different companies, and a total number of 449 tested items. For DVD-R and DVD-RW tests, physical format, logical format writer, logical format recorder and playback compatibility tests were conducted.

The physical format test performed compatibility evaluations on 1x to 8x speed writing using 24 8x DVD-R discs from 22 manufacturers and 12 writers from 12 manufacturers. At the same time, compatibility evaluations on 2x and 4x speed writing was performed using 8 4x DVD-RW discs from 8 manufacturers and 12 writers from 12 manufacturers. The number of media company participants increased to 23, up from the 18 who participated in the previous tests. The DVD-R market share of participants approached 91%, while DVD-RW market share was 85%. For 8x DVD-R media, the confirmation of disc and writer compatibility exceeded 95%. This included major characteristic tests such as Jitter and PI error. However, there were some combinations that showed poor compatibility, but this was not because of fundamental writer or disc defects. Of course, this can be improved by adjusting the writing strategies associated with discs. For 4x DVD-RW, good compatibility was obtained for almost all disc and writer combinations.

The logical format writer tests reported a high degree of compatibility among participating writers for both DVD-R and DVD-RW media. All drives were able to read the DVD-R NBCA of one or more test media. of course, the tests helped develop common understanding regarding interpretation of format specifications.