Fall 2004 DVDR Roundup: Dual Layer and 16X DVD+R

Write Quality Tests MCC 004

We read the 16X MCC 004 media in our Plextor drive with Q-Tools to check for errors that the various burners may have written. Again, only these drives were able to write to the 16X media properly for the PX712A to read.

As we described in our second section, PO errors are the ones to look for when testing certain types of discs with burners. These errors can render a disc unreadable and should be minded if they exist in the double digits or even too often in a small area for them to be corrected. The media written with the four drives that we were able to read with Q-Tools were virtually PO error free.

Shown below are the results for those drives that were capable of writing to MCC 004 16X media successfully.


It is obvious that there were no problems writing readable discs with the Sony, LG, Pioneer, and Nu Tech drives.


PI errors are not as ruthless as PO errors. For example, though Q-Tools has read 404,647 errors on the MCC 004 media written with the 710A, it doesn't mean that the disc is completely bad. Most of these errors were found towards the end of the disc, but data can still be read off that portion of the media.

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The screenshots above show that the DRU-710A has performed a successful write, but the read back on the Sony unit towards the end of the disc was a bit shaky. We mentioned earlier how media is prone to warping on the outer portions and this is where most of the errors can occur. Plextor Q-Tools confirms that by detecting over 400,000 PI errors within the last 1GB or so written to the MCC 004 disc. Take a look at the graphs from LG's GSA-4160B...

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Again, about 99.9% of the PI errors are at the end of the disc. The Nero screenshots show nothing in terms of trouble with writing or reading from the disc on the LG drive, mainly because it was able to correct these errors with ease.

The DW1620 and DVR-108D have done a better job at writing to the media with 6052 and 5614 PI errors respectively. We're disappointed that the other drives could not write to the MCC 004 media or could not be read with Q-Tools like the burn LiteOn's SOHW-1633S performed.