Philips DVDRW885K Double Layer - Page 20

Conclusion

After finishing our review, we concluded that the drive's performance was rather good. As a CD reader, the DVDRW885K had high speeds and very good seek times in all modes. As for the CD error correction, it was acceptable but we would like it to be better.

In the DVD tests, once again the drive showed good reading speed and low seek times. With scratced DVD media, the drive's ability to read over the defective areas was very good, where in our tests, no errors were reported. There was only one case where the speed dropped in order to read a scratch sized up to 1.1mm. The ripping speed was also fast.

Game protections are still a problem for the Philips drive. SafeDisk protected games newer than v2.51 cannot be backed up with the drive. The ripping speed for all game types we tried was good although it could be better. However, we consider that this recorder is designed for Double Layer recording and not for games backups.

Both the Key2Audio and the CDS200 protection schemes were not a problem for the DVDRW885K drive. In addition, it managed to rip the contents of our 90/99min test discs successfully.

The CD recording quality is very good with all the media we tried. This was expected since the maximum supported 24X speed is not too high. But we would like better behavior with Traxdata media. So perhaps, in a future firmware release, this should be addressed.

As for the writing quality with the DVD media, it was good. However, there were some cases with specific media where the PI/PIF levels were increased. This is also something that we would like to see improved.

The drive is priced at about 129 euro.

- The Good

• DL recording
• Burns most 4X DVD+R media at 8X
• Very good DVD writing quality with specific media
• Fast DVD reader & good DVD error correction
• Supports protected Audio discs (CDS200, Key2Audio)
• Booktype change feature

- The Bad

• DVD-R is not supported
• Does not backup SafeDisc2 v2.51x+ protected discs

- Like to be fixed

• DVD writing quality with specific media
• CD error correction could be better
• High C1/C2 errors with specific media (Traxdata)
• Overburning with DVD+R media