TDK 880N DVD±RW recorder - Page 14

Conclusion

The drive's ability in CD reading is good with low seek times. It doesn't have however very good error correction in this part. We would expect a better performance here.

As for DVD reading, TDK was fast with both recordable and pressed media. The seek times were rather low. The drive's DVD error correction ability is very good. Despite of the fact that it had to lower speed in order to read the defected area of our ABEX TDV-541 disc, it managed to playback all of our test discs without reporting any error. We tried to locate the problem using PowerDVD but nothing happened, there were no problems while playback. However we would like a better behavior with this disc.

The drive didn't managed to make working backups of protected CDs, except from Max Payne, which has the old version of SafeDisc protection the v2.5, where the backup was working only with the maiden drive. Apart from this, the drive is fast during the ripping process with all game types we tried.

According to DAE test the drive returned good performance. It also succeeded to playback and rip the contents of Key2Audio as well as the CDS200 protected Audio CDs. Thus the drive failed to play or rip 99 minutes AudioCDs but this didn't happen with 90min.

In the CD recording tests the TDK drive performed very good. The supported 32x maximum writing speed is high enough for a DVD burner. Also the writing CD quality is high, with all media brands we used. At this point we would like to mention that it would be better to avoid recording at 4x, as it did not gave the best results. Also the performance with Mam media may be improved with a new firmware upgrade.

In DVD recording tests the drive performed very good with high compatibility with all media formats and additionally, it recorded at 8x with many DVD+R, DVD-R brands. The PI/PO levels were low, in most cases. This is the strong part of TDK 880N.

The drive is already available in the market at the price of $189.