Lite-On SOHW-1633S Quickie Preview

[Ian]

With the NEC ND-3500A and Pioneer DVR-108 offering 16x DVD-R and 4x DVD+R DL writing speeds, many people have been over looking this drive.

[Ian]

Lite-On also sent over some of Mitsubishi's new 16x DVD+R media. Keep in mind these are early samples.





The SOHW-1633S is damn fast. The drive took less than 6 minutes to write an entire disc.

More coming soon...

[shimman]

looks good...hope that the quality is good, too

wish to see the full review soon

6 min to 8min is not much of difference for me, the quality matters...i really wish that i don't have to worry about having coasters

cheaper & faster dl writing is more important since dl takes forever compare to sl

[Ian]

Here's some results with the Mitsubishi 16x DVD+R media.

Kprobe:



PlexTools:



Avg Max Total
PIE 2.88 501 413100
POF - - 19


Not very good... Hopefully it will be better with production media. I've never had good luck with preproducton Mitsubishi media.

More results coming up.

[Silentbob343]

Ian,

I'm having a problem using Nero's scan disc utility to test out my burns and I can't use KProbe as I have a NEC 2510. Any suggestions on some software to test the quality of my DVDs? Every time I launch the scan disc utility and hit the start button an error message comes up; "Error initializing test".

After doing some research I realized that NEC drives aren't supported by CD-Speed's Disc Quality Check. Is the NEC 2510 not capable of reporting PI/PO errors?

Sorry to hijack your thread feel free to delete if you want.

[Halc]

[offtopic]
Nec 2510 does not support reporting PI/PIF/PO/POF in a known way.

It can't be used with Disc Quality Scan in CD DVD Speed.

The same applies to Pioneer drives.

Supported drives:

http://www.cdspeed2000.com/go.php3?link=cdspeed30.html


[offtopic]

Back to topic....

I don't personally think that the 3s series drives produce very good results based on all the prelim results. Of course, as with any LiteOn, that might improve slightly with new firmware. Still, I don't think they offer viable competitoin against LG, Nec and BenQ, imho. The quality just isn't there with the 3s LiteOns.

However, the smart money is (imho) on the 5s series drives rumouredly coming next as it's completely a new chipset, hopefully devoid of the Mediatek supposed performance bugs.

But as always, we'll see when we'll see. There is always something new around the corner.

rgds,
halc

[Ian]

Here are a few tests with Memorex's new 16x DVD+R media (CMC MAG M01)



I was a little surprised that these discs didn't work at 16x like with Memorex's drive. I see a firmware update for the 1633S in the near future.....



KProbe:



The results are better with the CMC media.. still not great though



Avg Max Total
PIE 4.00 133 573073
POF - - 0

DVD+R DL results are coming later...

[rdgrimes]

The only readable 16x burn I've gotten with this drive is TY T01/01 burned at 16x using Ricoh R03 strategy. T02 is useless above 8x. Very dissapointing. Likewise, all other media is 8x only if you want a readable disc.

Likewise, TY is the only media that burns well with stock strats at 8x, all other media requires a strat swap to get decent results. With the strat swaps, the results can be quite good.

Functionally, the 1633 is an 8x burner, and DL burning has failed for me as well. The new MTK running OPC scheme kicks in at 12x, and burn quality suffers massively as soon as that happens. I think MTK is to blame for the problems with this drive. WE can hope for frimware fixes for some of the problems, but lets face it, LiteOn doesn't seem to be able to create a decent FW any more.

On the up side, this is an awesome reading drive. Setting read speeds at 12x produces very fast movie rips, but 16x reading generally slows things down too much as the drive struggles above about 14x.

[rdgrimes]

BTW, Ian. Any chance you can have a peek at the OPU and chipsets to confirm they are :

MT1828E
MT1816E
DB11S

[MediumRare]

I see a firmware update for the 1633S in the near future.....

That's not news -and that's for rather fresh firmware (18 Aug).

I hope they get a grip on the writing issues with the 3S drives, even though they are great readers (like rdgrimes said).

G

[WavyGRavy]

Can someone send me a copy of the firmware?