Suitable for most of the every day back up needs, Samsung's latest release, the SH-W162C DL burner is sure to win a place in the end users wish-list. Speed, quality, some handy features are all part of the SH-W162C's design and capabilities. In a few words, a good drive.

In the transfer rate tests, the Samsung drive gave its best, managing to keep on par with the other two comparison drives ( the other two being two of the best speced drives on the market), with no significant speed differences when it came to CD media. But with the DVD reading speeds, the Samsung drive lags behind. In the error correction arena, the SH-W162C battled its way to the top of the list with some of the best, managing to successfully read all the defective media inserted. Both CD and DVD error correction was good. Overall a good mechanism that would allow processing of most defective media inserted.

When it comes to protected media, audio protected CDs were no match for the drive's ripping capabilities, as it managed to rip and backup successfully, all inserted audio media. The drive also managed to rip all protected games media inserted. Remarkably enough, the SafeDisc protected game was ripped in only 4:10mins. The amazing thing here is that the drive is capable of creating working backups of Safedisc protection up to v3.1!!!

Moving on to writing quality, one could describe the drive as a decent writer. With the exception of a few media, the SH-W162C managed to produce good burns with low PI values even though the CD-Speed graphs reported some ups and downs in the process. At 16X burning speed, the drive managed to burn even some of the not so high a quality media, such as Optodisc, reporting good quality burns for both DVD+R and -R media. Good quality was a fact with 8X media also, while with DVD+RW/-RW media, quality was somewhat divided. DL quality with both formats was satisfactory with 5X burning speed for +R DL and 4X for -R DL.

Bitsetting with all plus format media is included in the drive's advanced features. The only problem we encountered was when we set the booktype of a +RW disc, the changes could not be recognised by the Samsung drive itself or by any of the other burners we used to read the particular +RW disc. However, with the Lite-On 167 DVD-ROM drive, the particular disc was confirmed as DVD-ROM. An interesting addition is the MagicSpeed Utility provided by Samsung, which enables the user to set the drive for one of two speed modes, one to to maximize the reading capabilities of the drive for the inserted media and one for silent operation. The magic speed utility can be found on Samsung's web site.

- The Good

- Good CD and DVD error correction capabilities
- Supports audio protected discs
- Can create working backups of Safedisc v3.1
- No problems against Key2Audio and CDS200 AudioCD protections
- Magic Speed utility
- Supports bitsetting for DVD+R and DVD+R DL

- The Bad

- Cannot play 90/99min Audio CDs
- Cannot overburn DVD recordable media
- No DVD-RAM support

- Like To be fixed

- Writing quality with specific DVD media
- Minor Booktype issue with +RW media

Retail Package
Reading
Error Correction
Protected Discs
Writing
Features