Available speed and recording tests
VSO Inspector from VSO Software was used for gathering our information about the available recording speeds this BeAll Best DVD-R media could be recorded at on our review recording devices. This media information utility allows us to easily see the rated speeds available for the BeAll Best DVD-R media according to the hardware used during this review as well as tell us the full Media ID code for the media.
All the review drives saw the BeAll Best DVD-R media has capable of recording at its rated speed of 16x which is we would expect for Taiyo Yuden media ( its 8x media has been 16x rated on many drives for a while now ). Once the maximum available recording speeds for each device had been discovered using VSO Inspector, CD Speed from Ahead software was used to record a test DVD of maximum capacity to see if the review recording devices achieved their maximum recording speed.
As mentioned on page one of this review, the hardware used for these tests consisted of the NEC ND-3540AG, NEC ND-3520, Pioneer 109XL, BenQ DW 1620A, Plextor PX-716A and the Liteon-IT 1673S, all of which are maximum recording speeds of 16x for DVD-R media.
The DVD's created here with CD Speed will be used later on during the Disc Quality, Transfer and Verification tests. Tests carried out included the recording of 5 pieces of media to each drive with the exception of the Plextor PX-716A which had 5 pieces tested with both the Power Rec feature enabled and disabled as well as 5 pieces on the BenQ DW 1620A with both WOPC enabled and disabled.
"Of course achieving the fastest recording speed does not always mean you achive the best quality recording as we will be quick to point out to our readers. There is no point in
having the fastest recording if the quality suffers! Hardware manufacturers do sometimes slow media down in firmwares or limit the max speed for each particular piece of media recorded to achieve the best quality possible and prevent a bad recording."
Overview of recording times
These are the recordings that come closest to being the average recording times for each writer and have been calculated by recording 5 pieces of media to each drive. The quickest and slowest times for each drive will not be used in this review.
| | Writer used: | Average recording time | | DW 1620A BenQ (firmware: B7V9) | 5:55 | | | ND-3540 NEC (firmware: 1.01) | 5:57 | | | DVR 109 XL Pioneer (firmware: 1.57) | 5:58 | | | ND-3520 NEC (firmware: 3.04) | 5:59 | | | PX-716A Plextor (firmware: 1.08) | 6:11 | | | 1673S LiteOn (firmware: JS07) | 7:58 | |
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Please read on to see what our other tests discovered about the recorded media during our Disc Quality, Transfer and Playback tests.
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