detail information

The Philips DVDRW885 supports writing CD-RW discs at 10x speed only and it supports writing DVD+RW discs at 4x.

Re-Writing data:

For this test we set up a new compilation containing 650Mb of data in Nero Burning ROM. We used the DAO (Disc At Once) writing method. In the screenshot below you can see that the burn process completed successfully.

The Philips DVDRW used 8 minutes and 3 seconds for writing the disc at 10X, let us compare this to some other writers; The Plextor PX-708A used 3 minutes and 39 seconds to write the disc at 24x and the NU DDW-082 used 3 minutes and 37 seconds to write the disc at 24x. Well, we can't expect it to keep up with the other two drives due to the low speed of only 10x.

And here is the writing time for writing 4.4Gb of data to a Ricoh 4X DVD+RW disc:

The Philips DVDRW885 used 14 minutes and 46 seconds to write the disc, as a comparison the NU DDW-082 used 14 minutes and 34 seconds and the NEC ND-2500A used 13 minutes and 52 seconds. This makes the Philips DVDRW885 a bit slower than the two other drives.

CD-RW Packet writing:

Now it's time to take a look at the packet writing performance of the Philips DVDRW885. We used Ahead InCD to write 401 MB (421 003 264 bytes) data to the disc.

It's slower than most other drives due to the low speed of only 10x, but there were at least no problems.

DVD-RW/DVD+RW packet writing tests:

We used Ahead InCD to format and write 2Gb (2 217 820 160 bytes) data to the disc.

The DVD+RW packet writing performance is noticeably worse than for most other drives, but we suspect this to be cause by InCD, which is a very unstable program that never performs the same from version to version.

Writing Quality with Re-Writable discs:

Due to request from our readers we will add a few write quality tests with Re-Writable media. Settings and testing procedures is the same as used earlier in this review so you may want to go back and read them if unsure. All discs used for these tests have been written to before, but none have been written to more than 25 times.

CD-ReWritable media:

The result is very good and this media should not cause any problems.

Low quality discs, and as we could see the amount of C1 errors is pretty high, but there are at least no C2 errors.

DVD+ReWritable media:

Not the best result we have seen with these discs, so there is room for improvements.

The result is pretty good with this media, not that surprising as it has a Philips media code.

Although the amount of errors is a bit higher than for most other DVD+RW discs the reading curve shows few problems.

Pretty good and there is only a slight slowdown at the end of the reading curve.

To sum it up: It will not win a price for anything here as it's pretty average compared to most other drives and things could be improved. For example CD-RW writing speed as well as writing quality with ricoh DVD+RW media etc could have been better.

Before we round off this review, let us run the drive through some advanced tests at next page…