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AnnandTech Test 8 - 16X DVD Burners

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AnnandTech Test 8 - 16X DVD Burners

Postby 21st Hermit on Mon Nov 01, 2004 5:58 pm

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2260

The NEC3500 is tops. Funny thing the fastest 16X Burners, burn at 11-12X. Well Golly . . . Who'da Thunk!!! #-o

Just like my BTC 1008IM, nice 4X burner.
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Postby dolphinius_rex on Mon Nov 01, 2004 6:13 pm

reading that "review" is painful to me....
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Postby Ian on Mon Nov 01, 2004 6:31 pm

Kristopher is getting better.. I'll give him that. However, I wish he would test with more media. These roundups just don't do drives justice when you test only 2-3 types of media.

Also, why do people keep using average writing speed as an indicator of how fast a drive is? Things like OPC tests and leadin/leadout can make the writing time take longer.

The CDR writing tests seem to be a little off as well. The average writing speed for the Lite-ON and Sony drives should have been much higher. Higher than the NEC in fact considering it uses Z-CLV and the others CAV.
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Postby dolphinius_rex on Mon Nov 01, 2004 7:51 pm

He still seems to think that when a drive has a running OPC it has lousy burn quality. Page 3 of the review is very misleading... the way *I* read it at least.
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Postby Ian on Mon Nov 01, 2004 8:21 pm

dolphinius_rex wrote:He still seems to think that when a drive has a running OPC it has lousy burn quality. Page 3 of the review is very misleading... the way *I* read it at least.


Yeah, I read it the same way as well. Oh well.. what are you gonna do?
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Postby masotime on Mon Nov 01, 2004 8:48 pm

Image

How can the NEC 3500 possibly overspeed MCC003 media with official firmware???
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Postby pchilson on Mon Nov 01, 2004 9:19 pm

My biggest complaint is the BenQ 1620 results were taken with firmware B7H9 which is 3 versions old.
I understand the time from review to "publication" can be lenghty but you can at least state there have been 3 updates since the results were compiled and maybe even a limited test of the worst results on the latest firmwares.
Just makes it look to people who know the difference that the "review" is biased.
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Postby thegdog on Tue Nov 02, 2004 2:02 am

masotime wrote:How can the NEC 3500 possibly overspeed MCC003 media with official firmware???

Huh? The NEC-ND25xx drives wrote some quality media at faster than rated speed, and the NEC ND-3500 does as well. Since 12x and 16x media is not currently available to most users, NEC has allowed for some media to be written at those speeds if the drive can do so with good write quality.

There are a number of discs that can be written at 12x and 16x that are only rated for 8x, including discs from Taiyo Yuden, Maxell, Sony, and TDK (as I recall).
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Postby masotime on Tue Nov 02, 2004 3:24 am

Yeah, but I am VERY sure that it doesn't overspeed MCC003 media, because I'm a user of the TDK1616N (NEC 3500 OEM), and I've tried all kinds of firmwares (mostly Liggy's beta firmwares which attempt to overspeed MCC 003 amongst other media codes....) but I've never suceeded in overspeeding MCC 003 beyond 8x. I've been complaining about it recently in my country.... trying to push for it in the TDK 2.C9 new firmware.

To be honest, I think the review is very badly done......
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Postby hjs on Tue Nov 02, 2004 4:16 am

Can the nec 3500 do bitsetting with official firmware?
he had some comment about the newest firmware can do, but if i look at the NEC firmware pages, i cant even find a 3500 firmware ?

The official firmwares past 2.16 (our tested version) support DL bitsetting automatically, anything past 2.26 supports SL bitsetting as well.


someone got a link?
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Postby jsl on Tue Nov 02, 2004 5:50 am

masotime wrote:How can the NEC 3500 possibly overspeed MCC003 media with official firmware???

It doesn't. If you check the pictures in the zips you can see that this table shows the read transfer graphs, not the write speed. Another major screw-up for AT, I'm not surprised...
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Postby Ian on Tue Nov 02, 2004 9:00 am

The official firmwares past 2.16 (our tested version) support DL bitsetting automatically, anything past 2.26 supports SL bitsetting as well.


Huh? These firmware are essentially the same. The last digit signifies the revision. The second digit signifies which OEM it was for. If anything, the OEM wanted bitsetting for DL and SL media.
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Postby hjs on Tue Nov 02, 2004 9:07 am

page 3 of the comments is that qoute from

Tom's also has a burner test. speed speed speed, it all that count :roll:
http://www20.tomshardware.com/storage/2 ... index.html
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Postby dolphinius_rex on Tue Nov 02, 2004 11:29 am

jsl wrote:
masotime wrote:How can the NEC 3500 possibly overspeed MCC003 media with official firmware???

It doesn't. If you check the pictures in the zips you can see that this table shows the read transfer graphs, not the write speed. Another major screw-up for AT, I'm not surprised...


#-o
Punch Cards -> Paper Tape -> Tape Drive -> 8" Floppy Diskette -> 5 1/4" Floppy Diskette -> 3 1/2" "Flippy" Diskette -> CD-R -> DVD±R -> BD-R

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Postby Ian on Tue Nov 02, 2004 12:00 pm

hjs wrote:page 3 of the comments is that qoute from

Tom's also has a burner test. speed speed speed, it all that count :roll:
http://www20.tomshardware.com/storage/2 ... index.html


Gah.. they didn't test any of the drives at 16x with -R media and some of them didn't even write to +R media at this speed. I wonder why they bother sometimes.

Also, don't they realize the DVR-A08XLA and DVR-108 are different? They use both names for the same drive.
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Postby thegdog on Tue Nov 02, 2004 2:13 pm

masotime wrote:Yeah, but I am VERY sure that it doesn't overspeed MCC003 media, because I'm a user of the TDK1616N (NEC 3500 OEM), and I've tried all kinds of firmwares (mostly Liggy's beta firmwares which attempt to overspeed MCC 003 amongst other media codes....) but I've never suceeded in overspeeding MCC 003 beyond 8x.

Hmm, I was looking at Liggy's posts about the media codes and according to his list, the 2.17 firmware has the ability to write the media faster:

Code: Select all
4d 43 43 20 30 33 52 47 32 30 20 20 52 01 -> [MCC 03RG20  ] 2.0 4.0 6.0 8.0 12.0 16.0


http://club.cdfreaks.com/showpost.php?p=709907&postcount=189
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Postby Gen-An on Tue Nov 02, 2004 2:40 pm

thegdog wrote:
masotime wrote:Yeah, but I am VERY sure that it doesn't overspeed MCC003 media, because I'm a user of the TDK1616N (NEC 3500 OEM), and I've tried all kinds of firmwares (mostly Liggy's beta firmwares which attempt to overspeed MCC 003 amongst other media codes....) but I've never suceeded in overspeeding MCC 003 beyond 8x.

Hmm, I was looking at Liggy's posts about the media codes and according to his list, the 2.17 firmware has the ability to write the media faster:

Code: Select all
4d 43 43 20 30 33 52 47 32 30 20 20 52 01 -> [MCC 03RG20  ] 2.0 4.0 6.0 8.0 12.0 16.0


http://club.cdfreaks.com/showpost.php?p=709907&postcount=189


That's a different code. MCC 03RG20 is MKM's as-yet-unreleased 16x DVD-R media. MCC 003 is its 8x +R media.
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Postby thegdog on Tue Nov 02, 2004 2:56 pm

Gen-An wrote:That's a different code. MCC 03RG20 is MKM's as-yet-unreleased 16x DVD-R media. MCC 003 is its 8x +R media.

D'OH! Sorry. When I looked at their chart, I saw the 8x DVD-R in the header and looked in that section of the media table.

My bad.
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Postby burninfool on Tue Nov 02, 2004 4:58 pm

Anandtech forgot one test...DVD-Video ripping,and what's with the "calculated averages"?
I agree about the firmware issue and that's why I like Lite-On and BenQ because of their frequent updates.
I'll give Anandtechs' review a C and Toms' a B.
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Postby kcbaltz on Tue Nov 02, 2004 5:24 pm

I got linked to to this discussion from the Slashdot comments about the review. I can see that it's not well received, but are there specific things that a newbie should be concerned about with Anandtech's conclusions? I.e. I was going to take them at their word and buy the NEC. Should I be too worried? Is the BenQ a better choice? I'm primarily concerned with features over speed.
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Postby Wesociety on Fri Nov 05, 2004 12:20 am

The NEC 3500A and the BenQ 1620A are both good drives.
Although not due to anything that Anandtech or Toms had to say...
Their "conclusions" are based on the wrong information. :(
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Postby dolphinius_rex on Fri Nov 05, 2004 5:36 am

The best part about the BenQ is that it doesn't need hacking to bring out its' full potential. The firmware support BenQ gives is easily 10x as good as NEC, and the extra features such as PI/PIF scanning, and automatic bitsetting for all DVD+R/RW/9 media can come in very handy. I would HIGHLY recommend a BenQ DW1620 to anyone who is not confident hacking firmware, or running bitsetting tools on their own (although BenQ also includes a bitsetting tool you can use, but it is redundant).

Not to say the NEC 3500a is bad, because it isn't... but it's not as user friendly as the BenQ.
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Postby pchilson on Fri Nov 05, 2004 10:10 am

dolphinius_rex wrote:The firmware support BenQ gives is easily 10x as good as NEC

Hell, if they did "nothing" they would be "as good"...
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Postby I_Dzhugashvili on Tue Nov 16, 2004 6:02 pm

Well okay, so where do you go to get reviews of burners? Even I could tell the burner review that Tom's did was of almost no value, but the Anandtech review seemed pretty good to me, but plenty of people here seem to think that, no, that was no good either. CDfreaks has some reviews, and this site has some reviews, but to take a really obvious example, neither of these sites have seem review of the NEC 3500A. Yet some people have the opinion that it's a very good drive! Surely these people can not afford the time nor the money to buy and test all the drives which they discuss.
So my situation is this: I need to buy a burner, but the selection of reviews on, let us say, with no intention to insult any other sites, these two reputable sites, allows me to look at a very narrow selection of drives. VERY narrow. Considering the, shall we say, "unsettled" state of DVD burner technology, this is a a very bad thing indeed. I see people here talking about the relative merits of burner A versus burner B, and have no idea what these opinions are based on. I am NOT saying that these opinions are baseless, but if there is some other site that publishes an extensive collection of in-depth reviews, I would be glad to know what it is. I thought that the Pioneer 108 was good, but no, CDfreaks says that is not. An NEC 3500A might be good, but I can not seem to find a worthwhile review. Maybe the TDK-branded NEC is good, but I have no idea how to find out.
Anyway, what my actual question is, is this:
"Why is is that so many people seem to know alot about DVD burners and why is it that *I* can't even find decent reviews about these same drives?"
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Postby dodecahedron on Tue Nov 16, 2004 6:38 pm

there is no NEC review here @CDRLabs since in the US, untiln now, NEC only sold drives as OEM drives.
you can find reviews of NEC drives rebranded by other companies.

though this has changed recently and NEC is starting to sell their own brand. there is a NEC 3500 review in the works.
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