SONY DW-G120A

Review Pages

The DW-G120A is the latest release drive from Sony, supporting all the required DVD formats. It supports 8X writing speeds for DL media, while it is also able to burn DVD-RAM discs at 5X, which is something that you may not find in many drives out there.

Reading is not the strong point of this drive, only supporting 40X for both CD-R and CD-ROM media. With DVD-ROM reading, the drive supports 16X for SL, as do most of the latest drives, but with DL media, it only supports up to 8X, while other drives can read at up to 12X. Unfortunately, as with most drives, the Sony DW-G120A cannot read 90/99 min Audio CDs although in the DAE quality test, it scored 100. In DVD ripping, the drive produced average speeds.

In contrast, protection schemes are a strong point of the drive, managing to bypass all the audio protections that we threw at it while it also read (quite fast) the Safedisc 2 protected game, but keep in mind that this is an old Safedisc version and is not being used in the latest games. Nevertheless, we checked if it can rip the newest protection schemes, and as with all other drives that we have seen until now, it could not produce a working backup.

Average to good performance was reported by the DW-G102A in our CD error correction tests, obtaining a very good score with the ABEX 721R test disc, and a perfect score with the ABEX 726. In the CD-Check Audio Test, the better drives drives can pass the 4th or even the 5th level, whereas the SONY drive only passed the 3rd level. The drive has an excellent DVD error correction mechanism, reading all the test discs without producing any errors and without having to drop speed at any point.

In CD-R burning, the drive is again slow, with 40X burning speed. Also, the quality that we saw at that speed was far from satisfactory, with only Memorex CD-R media managing to get a pass with the Clover System. In DVD writing, the drive produced average quality and in some cases bad quality, with either unsteady CDSpeed graphs or high error counts in Plextools. There were however some media that produced good quality. We also re-checked any bad quality media (high error counts or unsteady speed graphs), with the Almedio AEC-1000 error checker. Unfortunately, the bad quality was confirmed, with all the tested media being given as "bad condition". We hope a future firmware release will improve things here.

The DW-G120A supports MKM DVD-R DL 8X media, reporting acceptable quality with Plextools and a steady CDSpeed graph. This is the first drive we've seen write the MKM media at 8X, since all other drives that we have tested until now, only support it at 6X or 2X burning. The quality with MKM DVD+R DL 8X was a disappointment, producing high error levels and counts at the beginning of the second layer. Our LiteOn drive was unable to read the second layer. :-(

The drive supports the booktype feature for plus media, with the exception of DVD+R DL, which is set by default to DVD-ROM.

- The Good