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DVD-R media compatibility and write quality:

Again perfect results, as always with Taiyo Yuden we may say. Highly recommended.

Even though the reading curve shows the disc to be fine it's not the best result we have seen with these discs, so there is room for improvement. The error level also slightly exceeds the standards.

The result with these Memorex DVD-R discs manufactured by CMC Magnetics is very good. Highly recommended discs, but notice that the quality of CMC Magnetics manufactured discs varies from brand to brand and batch to batch.

This is the first time we have seen bad results with these Ritek manufactured discs, very disappointing. We can't recommend these discs for use with this drive. Re-tested with firmware 0048, the result stays the same.

Even though the error level is a bit high in the beginning they are read back pretty good and will probably not cause you any problems.

We had a hard time finding Princo DVD-R discs that this drive would write at 4X. Most types we tried gave back a power calibration error or wrote at 2X only. But this is the result from one of the discs we were able to write at 4X. And as we could see the result is not good at all as the disc is unreadable because of the huge amount of errors in the beginning. Definitively not recommended.

We had a hard time finding Princo DVD-R discs that this drive would write at 4X. Most types we tried gave back a power calibration error or wrote at 2X only. But this is the result from another type that we were able to write at 4X. Even if it's better and the reading curve is okay we can't really recommend Princo at all with this drive.

Written with firmware version 0048. With version 0047 these discs would not write at all, the drive returned a power calibration error. The quality when written is really low and K-Probe failed scanning at 31%, and sure enough the reading curve also shows that the disc is unreadable. Stay away from these.

Lead data is not known for making the best discs, but the result obtained with this drive is not good at all and the disc is unreadable at the end. Not recommended.

The K-Probe result is horrible, but this time the reading curve shows fewer problems than expected. We did try to scan and read the disc in different drives at different speeds but the result did not change much. Notice that it wrote the disc at 2X only. Not recommended for use with this drive.

Another media type that works pretty bad, as it's unreadable after the 3Gb mark. Very disappointing and there is definitively room for improvements.

Written with firmware version 0048, with firmware 0047 it would also write, but no readers was able to even recognize the written disc. After looking at the K-Probe scan we got surprised that the JLMS XJ-HD165H was able to read the disc, but it did read the disc successfully. Not recommended for use with the Mediagear drive.

It did very good with these discs but that was expected as the quality og these discs is very good, we could recommend these discs without any problems at all.

Notice that we had limited amount of media available due to limited amount of media available in Norwegian stores. Discs that we would like to include in our reviews: Maxell, pioneer, prodisc and optodisc DVD media. But currently discs from these manufacturers are not found in Norway.

Another strange thing we noticed is that it starts writing longer away from the centre of the disc compared to other writers. We are unsure if this may affect the reading compatibility with some drives. Below are pictures to illustrate this.

 
This is a DVD-R disc written with the Mediagear / BTC DRW1004IM drive.

 
This is a DVD-R disc written with a Pioneer DVR-106D.

Both scans is of a RitekG04 DVD-R disc. The Lite-On LDW-411S wrote discs similar to the Mediagear written discs with the earlier firmware versions, and those discs was not playable in many standalone DVD players and X-box consoles. With later firmware versions Lite-On fixed both the strange DVD-R writing issue and the compatibility problem.

But we can't say for sure if this 'Starts writing longer away from the centre" 'problem" is related to compatibility and playability. But we do know that all other writers we have (Pioneer, NEC, LG, Lite-On, Plextor and Pioneer) starts writing closer to the centre than the Mediagear drive. This affects DVD-R/RW only and not DVD+R/RW.

Overall we are not very satisfied as very few disc types gave back acceptable results. A few types did also refuse to write and returned a Power Calibration Error. Mediagear and BTC should put their heads together and try to improve the media compatibility and write quality.

This concludes our DVD-writing tests so head on to next page and read about the packet writing performance of this drive…