detail information

The specifications of the Lite-On SOHW-1653S state that the drive is able to write CD-R discs at 48x. Let us find out how the drive really performs in speed and quality.

Writing Data CD-R discs:

Let us first take a look at the CD-R write technology used by the Lite-On SOHW-1653S:

As we could see the Lite-On SOHW1653S uses CAV (Constant Angular Velocity) to write at its rated speed of 48x, this gives an average speed of 37.49x. This seems to be right where it should be for a 48x writer. But let us take a look at the speed with two other writers, for comparison purposes.

The Mad Dog MD-16XDVD9 uses CAV (Constant Angular Velocity) to write at its rated speed of 48x. This gives an average speed of 36.38x.

As we could see the Plextor PX-712A uses CAV (Constant Angular Velocity) writing strategy to reach it rated speed of 48X. This gives an average speed of 36.43x.

And as a last test we wrote a disc containing 700Mb using Nero Burning ROM software. Writing method used is DAO (Disc At Once), and the disc is set up as a non-multisession disc with 'finalize disc" enabled.

The Lite-On SOHW-1653S used 2 minutes and 44 second to write the disc at 48x. Let us see how this compares to other drives;

As we could see the Lite-On SOHW-1653S is one of the fastest at CD-Writing. That's a plus in our book.

Write Quality:

We will test CD-R discs from a total of 7 different CD-R manufacturers. To really measure the write speed, we used the 'create data CD" function in Nero CD-Speed. The discs were written at the maximum speed that the drive supports. For the quality test, we used K-Probe 2 which is a tool developed by a Lite-On Employee. It runs under Windows and works with drives made by Lite-On. Also note that different drives and different reading speeds may affect the results obtained when scanning the discs. We used a Lite-On LTR-52246S drive with firmware 6S0F and scanned the discs at 48X speed.

A written CD-R disc will always have some C1 errors; C1 errors are easily corrected by the drive's error correction capabilities. The next level of errors is C2, while C2 errors could also be corrected by most drive's error correction capabilities; they are not wanted on a good quality disc. A good disc should not contain any C2 errors, and preferably have an average C1 error amount of below 2.0 for the best discs, or at least below 10.0 average for good quality discs. After C2 errors there are only un-correctable errors that will make a disc unusable.

Why wait any longer? Below are the obtained results:

CMC Magnetics is not known for making the best CD-R discs but the result produced here is quite good, although not perfect. We are still disappointed to see that it wrote the disc at 40x only.

A pretty good result with these CD-R discs.

Perfect quality, but disappointing that the drive only supports these discs at 40x speed.

Disappointing that this media also works at 40x only, but the result is pretty good.

Excellent quality as expected. But the low writing speed of only 32x is very disappointing.

For a reason or another it would only write these prodisc CD-R's at 16x, but the quality is acceptable.

We have found these Samsung CD-R discs, manufactured by Plasmon, to be of very low quality. And as we could see the C1 error count is a bit higher than for most other media types.

The drive produced a pretty good result with this disc, but unfortunately only at 40x.

Since so few discs worked at 48x speed we tried some other discs - just to see what speed we could obtain (by disc manufacturer); nanya plastics 48x CD-R write at 40x, TDK 52x CD-R wrote at 48x, fujifilm 52x CD-R wrote at 40x, princo 48x CD-R wrote at 40x, sony 52x (made by lead data) CD-R wrote at 32x and daxon 48x wrote at 32x.

CD-ReWritable:

The Lite-On SOHW-1653S supports a CD-ReWriting speed of 24x, let us see how this compares to other writers. Let us start with taking a look at the writing strategy it uses;

The Lite-On SOHW-1653S uses Z-CLV, (Zone-Constant Linear Velocity), to write at its rated speed of 24x, this gives an average speed of 22.57x. This again seems a bit slower compared to other drives, below are some other drives for comparison.

The Pioneer DVR-107D uses Z-CLV, (Zone-Constant Linear Velocity), to write at its rated speed of 24x, this gives an average speed of 22.47x.

The Plextor PX-712A, with its P-CAV (Partial-Constant Angular Velocity) write speed of 24X for Ultra Speed CD-RW discs is among the faster writers due to its high starting speed of 21.12x.

And we did also write a disc in Nero Burning ROM, the compilation we made was 650Mb large and we wrote the disc with the Disc At Once write method.

The Lite-On SOHW-1653S used 3 minutes and 55 seconds for writing the disc at 24x, let us compare this to some other writers;

Slightly slower than most other drives due to the fact that is uses Z-CLV writing technology. But let us look at the CD-RW writing quality:

There are at least no C2 errors, but it's still not the best result we have seen with this disc type.

Low quality discs, and as we could see the result is horrible. When trying to read it back we found it to be completely unreadable of course.

Summary:
It offers good CD-Writing, but it's a long time since we have had a drive with such poor media compatibility. CD-RW writing quality and speed is nothing to shout hurray for either.

But after all, it's a DVD-Writer, so head on to next page and read about DVD-Writing performance and DVD media compatibility…