detail information

DVD-R media compatibility and write quality:

The result with these TY discs is good enough, so we have no problems recommending these discs.

Also some highly recommended discs for use with this drive.

The result with these Memorex DVD-R discs manufactured by CMC Magnetics is very good, but notice that the quality of CMC Magnetics manufactured discs varies from brand to brand and batch to batch, so discs from other batches may not work as good as this.

Also some highly recommended discs and you should not have any problems with these either. But notice that the quality of Ritek discs also varies from batch to batch.

Another good result, as expected from these good and rather expensive discs. Highly recommended.

We did try some different Princo discs and got about the same results every time. It was a surprise to see that the disc was actually readable, but Princo varies much in quality and is not a brand that we would recommend.

Notice: This disc type is not on NU's supported media list.
The overall amount of errors is a bit higher than we prefer, and the reading curve shows some reading problems at the end.

Notice: This disc type is not on NU's supported media list.
The drive did surprisingly well with these very low quality discs, but still far from good enough to be recommended.

Notice: This disc type is not on NU's supported media list.
Surprise 1: Wow, that K-Probe result is not good. Surprise 2: Wow, the disc is still readable. We feel that the K-Probe scan and the reading curve do not completely agree this time as we expected the disc to be completely unreadable. But after all it seem like NU have a job to do on improving the firmware.

Notice: This disc type is not on NU's supported media list.
The result was not too surprising, as this is a very low quality disc type. Stay away from these.

Notice: This disc type is not on NU's supported media list.
Another very low quality disc type and another case where the K-Probe result and the reading curve disagrees, we expected the disc to be completely unreadable after having seen the K-Probe result but to our surprise it was completely readable. But you should still stay away from these discs.

Notice: This disc type is not on NU's supported media list.
Disappointing to such a bad result from these good quality discs, but after all it was not bad enough to cause any reading problems. More firmware improvements are needed.

Again we present a table with various media to see if all media types are supported at certified speed.

*This is a very problematic Princo disc type that few writers are able to recognize and write successfully.

As we could see the media support is very good and all disc types were supported at certified speed.

But since we have promised to get back to a DVD-R writing problem, here it is. There seems to be a problem with writing the lead in correctly with DVD-R discs, and to demonstrate this we include two images below:

This is a ritekG04 DVD-R disc written with the NU DDW-082

This is a ritekG04 DVD-R disc written with a Pioneer DVR-106D (just an example - most other drives writes discs identical to the pioneer).

A few other drives (Lite-On LDW-411S with the earlier firmwares is one example) that have had problems with DVD-R discs not being playable in some drives wrote discs looking identical to the NU DDW-082 written DVD-R disc.

And sure enough, some drives like Toshiba SD-M1612 DVD-ROM and Pioneer DVR-106D DVD-Writer do not recognize the DVD-R discs written by the NU DDW-082, so they have to fix that problem soon. But the dual format firmware is not yet in final stage and still under development, so we think and hope this problem will be fixed soon.

Overall thoughts: The writing quality on DVD+R discs is some of the best we have seen so it seems like the running OPC technology works as it should. The writing quality on most supported DVD-R media is also very good, but for the media that is not supported the quality is rather low. But we think this will be fixed in future firmware versions. They should also fix the DVD-R compatibility problem mentioned above.

Notice: The dual format firmware is not yet in final stage, and most of the DVD-R problems we had will hopefully be fixed in the final version that's expected to be released in April.

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