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Back in February we were very impressed with the performance of the Hewlett Packard and Ricoh DVD+RW drives, and this month Philips showed us what it can do.
Copying the same 3.9Mb of data to the DVDRW208K took 21 minutes 14 seconds, while formatting a blank disc took an equally impressive one minute 14 seconds. These results put it at level-pegging with the Ricoh and HP drives.
Philips rates the DVD+RW write performance at 2.5-speed, while CD performance is rated at 12-speed write and 10-speed rewrite. This was certainly borne out when we tested the CD burning performance. Burning 227Mb of mixed files to CD-R took two minutes 47 seconds, which was slightly faster than the Ricoh and considerably faster than the HP.
Copying the 505Mb VideoCD took only five minutes 22 seconds, some 25 seconds faster than the Ricoh and three minutes 47 seconds faster than the HP.
Formatting a CD-RW disc took around 10 minutes, but copying the same 227Mb of mixed files took four minutes 38 seconds, about a minute slower than the HP and Ricoh drives.
However, what puts the Philips package ahead is its software package. In the box you'll find MyDVD from Sonic and PowerDVD from Cyberlink, both of which are solid packages. But you also get Ahead's Nero 5.5 which supports both CD and DVD burning. This is easily one of the best media burning packages you can buy.
With a price tag of £549 inc VAT the Philips costs £50 more than the Ricoh, but the inclusion of Nero certainly makes up for it, and there's a lot to be said for having everything you need in the box.
Also, Philips assures us that DVD+R compatibility will be a software flash, so you won't need to buy a new drive when the write-once discs appear.
Contact: Philips 01756 702 892
www.philips.co.uk
See also:
A complete solution for capturing, editing and DVD authoring at an attractive price. 18 Jun 2002
A flexible, well-rounded internal DVD+RW drive with a full set of utilities. 23 May 2002
If packet writing performance is your thing, this drive is nothing short of staggering. 01 Feb 2002All Optical Drives (CD/DVD Drive)
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