Miflop Xtreme 16x DVD-R media review

Conclusion

Miflop in using the new TYG03 dye for their 16x DVD-R Xtreme range, have chosen to continue their partnership with Taiyo Yuden who produce the dye for this new range of their 16x DVD-R media. And after such sucess with their partnership for the 8x DVD-R range of media it was nice to see this brought forward to their new range. Of course the 16x DVD-R has a lot to live upto, - the 8x DVD-R version was a favourite amongst the recording scene and well renowned for its long term archival ability at speeds of 12x and above. Taiyo Yuden and Miflop set themselves such high standards could this really be kept up with their 16x DVD-R? Very soon we will see no more production of the 8x DVD-R version and so we like our readers are anxious to se a good 16x DVD-R version available for when this happens.

But before we give our final thoughts here is a brief explanation of of exactly how many piece of media where used on each review recording device as well as why we chose our particular Disc Quality review structure:

During this review, as is now standard for all CDR-Zone.Com reviews, 5 pieces of the Miflop Xtreme 16x DVD-R media where recorded to each drive, with the exception of the Plextor PX-716 which had 10 pieces recorded to ( 5 with Power Rec enabled/disabled ), and only the recording which most represents the average recording to each drive is shown in this review. We feel is how best to get a good reflection of well a particular drive/media combination works. We also tested 5 pieces of media on the BenQ 1620 using an edited write strategy swap.

We have also introduced a new way of doing our Disc Quality tests to try get as much accurate information about the recordings to the Miflop Xtreme 16x DVD-R media as possible. As mentioned in the Disc Quality section, the Plextor does allow us a more indepth look at each individual recording. The Liteon results with KProbe in conjuction with the Transfer tests are still in our opinion a very valid indication of a good/bad recording but we do get a lot more detail about just how good/bad the recording was if using the advanced tests available on the Plextor PX-716A. If you are to carry out any of the list of available tests we do highly recomend the use of PXScan which can conduct all of these tests in one go and display the results in an easy to understand format. The tests at the recomended settings can take over 1 hr 25 minutes to complete but it is much more convenient and just as accurate as doing all the tests individually in Plextor own software - Plex Tools Pro.

Consitency and low reported error levels are what we got with almost every one of the Miflop Xtreme 16x DVD-R media recording's as we would expect a Taiyo Yuden branded disc to. Taiyo Yuden have been a long time coming with this 16x DVD-R offering to the public and it seems to have been a wise choice with all of our review drives recording to the Miflop Xtreme 16x DVD-R extremely well with the excepion of perhpas the BenQ DW 1620 which did display very high PI Errors compared to all our other drives although we did produce results which where much more inline with the other recording devices used in this review by using a write strategy swap with Ala42's excellent MediaCodeSpeedEdit software (please note: this will invalidate your warranty with BenQ but hey we got great results - please see page 3 for the download link to our tests results). It is also still very possible that as this media is so new, that manufacturers of the recording devices used in our reviews do not yet have fully optimised support for this media as yet and better may be yet to come. Saying that the results we achieved on a consistent basis are very likeable!

Three out of all the tested pieces of Miflop Xtreme 16x DVD-R media did produce resuts that contained a small grouping of PI Failures at places near the first 10% of the recording. According to our Liteon-IT 1693S and KProbe, these errors where responsible for upto 500 out of a complete disc scan total of 700-870 in a very small group and the reported PI Failure maximum was 2 which is well within set standards but we make mention of this because it was unlike all the other recordings we had achieved during the writing of this review. Had all the recordings looked like this we wouldn't even of mentioned this fact but we had to find something to moan about! Please click on This Link for evidence of this small PI Failure grouping.

As we could find no visible defects such as dark spots of dye, scratches or general 'blotchiness' at these areas on the recorded media we can maybe deduce that the odd one had a weak spot but they didnt seem to interfere with playback tests or with the actual recording of the pit of the disc according to the tests results. If this is the worst that we can expect from a Miflop Xtreme 16x DVD-R media then the signs look very good for reliable recording.

The reported levels of jitter/beta on all review drives with the exception of the BenQ DW 1620 reported as very low indeed and even though higher then the rest of the review recording devices, it was still within set standards. The TA and peak shift test results on all review drives with the exception of the Liteon-IT 1693S reported very good Peak shift results and so we can deduce that the information recorded on the Miflop Xtreme 16x DVD-R media has been very well written - another very good sign for long term archival ability. This we believe is just a case of a quick firmware tweaks from both the Liteon and BenQ engineers to fix this hopefully.

Plextors owners should be advised that the Miflop Xtreme 16x DVD-R media seemed to record without too ill an effect with the Power Rec fuction disabled and we can make available the typical result Here. Anyone following our recent 16x media reviews may of noted that quite often we got bad amounts of errors towards the end of the disc on a regular basis with this option disabled on 16x recordings but this particular batch semed to behave well enough.

Plextor owners will know all about the Power Rec feature but in a nutshell it takes the information it finds when doing tracking and focus tests during calibration at the beginning of the recording and uses that information to decide on the optimun recording strategy and is per media specific. Recordings with this option enabled are like snowflakes with no two recordings being the same, but they all share the same goal of the Plextor trying to record as perfect a recording pit as possible and a more detailed explanation can be found Here at the Plextor website( Abode PDF reader required ). Plextor will always advise leaving this function enabled.

We couldn't finish this review without making mention of the printable surface used on this media. Although not as important as a good recording the printable surface still needs to be effective and the Miflop Xtreme 16x DVD-R media uses the same full face printable surface as is now familiar to any user of the 8x DVD-R version. It does produce a non shiny matt finish as opposed to some competitors shiny printable white top surfaces but as you should always use a ink fixative after printing to a printable disc to protect the colour and gives it a shine, we don't feel this is an issue. Our Epson R300 printer certainly had no issues printing to it and the ink was disnsed without any blotching being noted.

In summing up we found during this review of the Miflop Xtreme 16x DVD-R media that attaining 16x was possible to all review recording devices with some very good quality results on all drives in general. Was it any better than using a Taiyo Yuden 8x DVD-R at 16x as most drives seem to allow nowadays? - we would like to think so and we are hopefull that the results we have achieved during this review with our particular spindle of Miflops Xtreme 16x DVD-R media are consistent with the rest of the batches produced.

About Miflop Media:

Miflop Media is amongst the top 5 European Taiyo Yuden offical partners and work very hard to gaurantee the top grade of Taiyo Yuden media available today through their Miflop Xtreme range of media. Buy and record in confidence with media from the worlds leading brand name for Digital media quality.

About Taiyo Yuden:

Taiyo Yuden defines the de facto global standard for write-once recordable media through the development of high quality, highly reliable products based on the company's leading-edge technologies.

Over ten years' involvement in optical disk development has allowed Taiyo Yuden to cultivate high-level core technologies. These capabilities have enabled the company to achieve significant advances in thermal design technology for disk pigmentation and substrate design, and assure the ability to mass produce stable multi speed media.

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