detail information

Reading performance:

For these tests we will use Nero CD/DVD-Speed to read various CD and DVD's, including audio discs and DVD-media. As already mentioned in the introduction, this drive sports a specified read speed of 12X for DVD's and 40X for CD's.

Pressed discs:

For this test we used a pressed CD-ROM disc containing PlexTools v1.08 that is exactly 74 minutes long. Below you will see the produced result:

The Philips DVDRW885 had no problems reaching 40x and more, to see how this compares to other drives, look below:

New record! Fastest DVD-Writer we've had so far for reading. Good seek times too.

CD-Recordable Discs:

For this test we made a copy of the original PlexTools v1.08 CD. The disc we used was a Verbatim 48X certified CD-R disc manufactured by Mitsubishi Chemicals Corporation.

Again a perfect result, look below for a comparison table.

It's the winner again, good work Philips!

CD-ReWritable discs:

Again we made a copy of the original PlexTools v1.08 disc, this time we used a Verbatim High Speed (10X) CD-RW disc made by Mitsubishi Chemicals Corporation.

The drive reads CD-RW discs at full 40x. The result seems to be almost perfect, let us compare it to other drives below.

It's very fast but lags behind the NU and BenQ with a very short margin. Ok seek times as well as great speed, what more do you want?

Audio - Digital Audio Extraction:

To test the digital audio extraction performance of the Philips DVDRW885, we again used Nero CD/DVD-Speed to measure the transfer rate. The audio disc we used is slightly larger than the disc used for the other tests, to be exact it's about 78 minutes long (77:56:57).

The drive had no problems with reading the audio disc at full speed and everything seems good, so let us compare the result with other drives:

Amazing - it beats them all, for both speed and seek times!

Below is the results produced by EAC:

Burst mode

Secure mode

The drive performed excellent as expected in the burst mode test, but it's very slow for secure extraction and is among the slowest drives we've had for secure extraction.

Advanced audio - DAE quality test:

Before we move on to testing DVD read speeds we will take a last audio test, this time we used the 'Advanced DAE Quality Test" feature in CD-Speed.

The philips DVDRW885 did pretty well in this test, but lacks support for reading data from the lead-out.

DVD reading performance:

Again we will use Nero CD-Speed to measure the reading performance, this time for various types of DVD discs. The drive should read pressed single layer DVD-discs at 12X.

DVD - DVD-Video:

For our DVD reading performance tests we are going to start with single and dual layered DVD video discs. While only 1X speed is required to watch DVD movies, it's useful to be able to read the discs at higher speeds if you're going to extract (rip) the content of the disc to your hard drive.

As we can see, this drive reads single layer DVD-Video discs at full 12x speed and dual layer DVD-Video discs at 8x speed. How this compares to other drives may be seen in the table below.

Very good and it's among the fastest drives again.

 DVD+R(W):

For this test we used a Taiyo Yuden 4X DVD+R and a Ricoh 4X DVD+RW with about 4,4Gb of data. Below are the results:

The reading speed was locked to 8x for DVD+R and DVD+RW. Pretty normal for most new drives.

It's among the faster drives, but it's nothing too special.

DVD - DVD-R/RW:

For this test we used a Taiyo Yuden 4X DVD-R disc and a Verbatim 2X DVD-RW disc filled with about 4,4Gb of data. Our test results are found below:

There are hardly any differences compared to reading the DVD+R/RW discs.

Again it's among the faster drives, very good!

Overall thoughts:

The drive is very good for all reading operations, except for secure reading in EAC. But overall Philips has done a good job when fine tuning the reading abilities.

But now it's time to head on to a more interesting part: Writing CD-R discs…