Philips is one of the greatest manufacturers in the optical storage industry. So we expected this drive to be a certain success, and so it is. Beginning from CD/DVD reading performance, the Philips DVDR1648P appears to be one of the fastest drives on the market. The CD reading speed of 48X was not only confirmed but the drive also reached 50X. With DVD, the 12X supported reading speed for all DVD±R/RW media is rather good, and makes the drive faster than many other popular drives. When it comes to DVD-Video ripping, you'll find that you won't need an extra DVD-ROM reader since the Philips is certainly faster than any other.

You might think that sometimes it is much safer to read at a lower speed. While this might be correct in most cases, it is highly dependent on the drive's error correction ability. The DVDR1648P, as our tests showed, has a very strong CD and DVD error correction mechanism, so there will be no problem even at high reading speeds.

The Philips drive managed to obtain a perfect score of 100 in the CDSpeed DAE quality test, while its reading performance with AudioCDs is rather good. Note that the 48X CAV DAE speed supported by the Philips drive, which is the fastest available speed on the market today, is something that not many drives support. Our 99min Audio test disc was not a problem for the DVDR1648P but on the other hand, the 90min was. The drive failed to finish the test.

Protection schemes, especially for AudioCDs, are not a problem for the Philips drive which will play/rip any Key2Audio or CDS200 protected AudioCD. But when it comes to game protections, the scene changes. The drive reported average performance, managing to create working backups of Safedisc protection only up to version 2.8. So, if you are planning to get a drive to backup your protected games, we recommend you try a CD burner instead.

The Philips burner supports 48X CD writing speed, which is high, but too fast for quality results. So, it is better, if you want to make high quality CD backups, to use quality media and choose a speed lower than 48X. Our quality scans reported that the DVDR1648P is a good CD burner but at 48X, a little improvement won't go astray :-)

The supported recording speeds for the DVD formats are the highest available on the market. 16X for DVD±R/R, 8X for DVD+RW, 6X for DVD-RW, 8X for DVD+R DL and 4X DVD-R DL. According to our tests the drive has a large 16X media compatibility list, while it managed to overburn with both DVD+R and DVD-R media under CDSpeed but not with Nero Burning Rom, so there are some questions about this. The reported overall quality of the Philips was very good with rather low PIE error levels and smooth reading graphs in CDSpeed. With some specific media, the quality was not excellent, but better than average while this is also something which can be improved with a future firmware revision.

SolidBurn technology is claimed to guarantee high quality burns but there are some questions about whether the feature actually works or not. Enabling the SolidBurn feature did not make any difference in our tests. The possible reasons for this behavior are either the poor implementation of the SolidBurn in the Nero Beta software, or the premature version of the SolidBurn technology itself.

We expect Philips to further improve the SolidBurn feature. In addition, it would be reasonable to include a SolidBurn test function that would just test the media without actually recording data on it. This could allow users to decide whether they should use the function according to their media.

Booktype setting is something that Philips has supported from the outset. With the contribution of several utilities, such as DVDinfoPro or CDSpeed, you'll be able to change the booktype on all plus format media. With CDSpeed or DVDinfoPro, you can also measure writing quality on media, something we don't recommend however since the actual speed, as it was reported in our tests, was lower than 1X, unless you are extremely patient :-)

So, if you need a good drive in all tasks, we believe the the DVDR1648P to be one of your options...

- The Good

• Can burn DVD+RW media at 8X, and DVD-RW media at 6X
• DVD-R DL support at 4x, and DVD+R DL support at 8x
• Very good CD and DVD error correction capabilities
• Supports CD-Text (reading/writing)
• Supports audio protected discs
• Very Good DVD±R writing quality
• Can overburn up to 99min CDs
• Can overburn on DVD media
  Fast DVD-Video ripping speed
• Fast DAE speed
  Large DVD compatibility list for 16X recordings
• Supports Bitsetting for DVD+R, DVD+RW and DVD+R DL

- The Bad

• Mount Rainier is not supported
• Cannot create working backups with SafeDisc protected games over v2.90
• No overspeed
• The actual reading speed was very slow when measuring writing quality on DVD media

- Like To be fixed

• Some doubts about SolidBurn Technology
• There are some questions if the drive can actual overburn on DVD media

Retail Package
Reading
Error Correction
Protected Discs
Writing
Features