SONY DRU-530A DVD±RW recorder - Page 14

8x DVD-R recording

After the release of the new firmware upgrade v2.0a, which adds 8x DVD-R recording to Sony DRU-530A, we set our unit on our test PC in order to confirm this new feature.

At first, the CDSpeed confirmed the ability of the new firmware for 8x DVD-R recording. As it can been seen from the following screenshot the drive begins the writing process at 4x, maintaining this speed until the 1,2GB address mark on the disc, where steps up to 8x writing for the rest of the recording. The average speed was 6.87x.

The media we used was by CMC Magnetics, 8x DVD-R certified.

Burning a 4.3GB DVD-Video with Nero Burning Rom confirmed the 8x writing speed, although the duration of the task was increased (9:48min). This is due to the 4-8x Z-CLV writing strategy used, instead of the 6-8x used by some competitive drives:

According to specifications of the new firmware upgrade, the drive increases its DVD-RW recording from 2x to 4x. This is also confirmed after running a simulation recording under CDSpeed using a Mitsubishi Chemicals 4x DVD-RW media. The drive burned our test media at 4x CLV.

Below are available all the media we burned with the upgraded DRU-530A. As you can see the drive burned at 8x only with CMC magnetics media. On the other side, the Nec-2500A had burned all the media below at 8x.

KPRobe v1.1.28 measurements will give us a picture of the drive's DVD writing quality with DVD-R/-RW media.

• CMC Magnetics 8x DVD-R

The results are not any good since the PI/PO error rate is really high. The test was performed twice with the same results. The DVD-R disc was unreadable.

• Mitsubishi Chemicals 4x DVD-RW

• JVC 4x DVD-RW

In case of DVD-RW media recorded at 4x, the results are better than in the previous case. However, readability was not very good as Nero CDSpeed reports.

Sony DRU-530A managed successfully to burn at 4x our DVD-RW media. The PI/PO measurements were in acceptable levels and the output was playable. However we cannot say the same for 8x DVD-R writing. We managed to burn only one media brand at 8x, since the other brands were not allowed recording at 8x but at 4x. Also the output was not playable in PowerDVD. We tried twice to burn different DVD-R media but both times playback had problems. The first disc was completely unplayable while the second one played just for the first few movie minutes. This happened with all different DVD burners /players we tried.