TEAC DV-W512G Dual DVD±RW Recorder - Page 21

The TEAC DV-W512G comes at a strange time where many 16X recorders have hit the market supporting DVD+R DL format. The drive supports 12X DVD+R, 8X DVD-R along with 48X CD-R and 24X US-RW writing speeds, making it directly comparable with the LiteON SOHW-1213S and Plextor PX-712A.

The DV-W512G drive exhibited almost the same performance as the LiteON drive in all the reading tests. There were some small variations due to different firmware revisions, but the fact is that the Plextor PX-712A was faster in almost all reading and writing tests.

The biggest problem with the current firmware, is in the writing quality. Most of the produced DVD burns were out of specs, with very high PI/PIF error rates, making them un-readable in several cases...We hope that this can be fixed in the near future...

Listing other negatives, the drive cannot backup the latest SafeDisc protected titles, the CD Error Correction and C2% accuracy with scratched media is very low, while DVD Overburning and DVD-RAM are not so important a consideration so as to discourage you from buying the drive.

On the positive side, the possible buyer will benefit from the big unofficial support (KProbe, media speedhacks, RPC1). Perhaps with a little firmware tweaking, the burning results can be improved, even though this should be done by TEAC in the first place :-)

The DV-W512G can be used with KProbe to "scan" C1C2 and PI/PIF error rates with burned media. However, we don't suggest using it for that purpose, since our tests showed many differences between the various reading speeds. Scanning at 12X certainly seems useless, since the reported errors are way too high. At 8X/6X the drive reported far less errors than at 4X, which is again confusing. Lastly, with DL media, the reported PI/PIF errors were way too numerous, which of course isn't "true"...

The price of the drive is less than US$100 and possibly will drop even further when all 16X writers hit the market.

- The Good

• Low price
• Good DVD error correction
• Can overburn CDs up to 99 minutes
• Supports protected Audio discs (CDS200, Key2Audio)
• Good transfer speed for CSS DVD video ripping
• Supports BookType BitSetting for DVD+R/RW formats
• Big unofficial community support (KProbe, Speedhacks, RPC1 utilities)

- The Bad

• Poor CD error correction
• Low C2% accuracy with highly scratched media
• Doesn't backup SafeDisc v2.9 & 3.1x protected discs and doesn't create accurately backups for v2.8x & v2.5x
• Doesn't support reading of DVD-RAM media
• Doesn't support DVD overburning

- Like to be fixed

• Writing quality needs serious improvement with most tested media