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Hardware Review Websites Still Don't Get Optical Drives

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Hardware Review Websites Still Don't Get Optical Drives

Postby Ian on Wed Dec 02, 2009 1:08 pm

This morning I was reading a review of three Blu-ray combo drives at a highly respected hardware review website and realized that these people still don't understand how to review optical drives. I used to be very critical of places that gave awards to CD and DVD writers because of the software bundle or the specs listed on the box. Things eventually got a bit better, where the reviewer would do an occational benchmark, but they still didn't come close to places like CDRLabs or CDFre.. err Myce.

So I'm looking at this review today and see that they do a handful of transfer rate tests with a few types of CD, DVD and BD media. Out of CD and DVD media, they had only three types. Ripping DVD movies is usually the par for the course for these types of reviews, but they weren't even here. BD media was the most disappointing. They only tested with a BD movie and knocked the LG drive because they didn't realize it had riplock. If they would have used a non-protected BD-ROM or BD-R media, it would have read at 8x.

My biggest disappointment came with DVD writing. They burned two discs with each drive and there was no mention of writing quality. They knocked the LG once again, due to the dips in the transfer rate graph. As we all know, this is due to OPC.. not a buffer underrun issue.
"Blu-ray is just a bag of hurt." - Steve Jobs
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Ian
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