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As said on the previous page Sanyo's HD-BURN technology allows you to double the capacity of a standard CD-R disc (the technology will also work with CD-RW discs via a future firmware upgrade, this according to the Sanyo website).

The HD-BURN technology works by reducing the minimum pit length and shortening the track pitch. In the picture below you can roughly see how the technology works:

A disc written with the HD-BURN technology should be compatible with a DVD-player, if its firmware has been modified to allow reading of this type of media. Normal computer drives will not be able to read HD-BURN disc. HD-BURN also cannot be used to create audio discs with.

On this page of our review we're going to do some small tests and see how HD-BURN works. For our tests we used Nero Burning ROM and VSO's CopyToDVD software.

Nero Burning ROM:

When starting a new compilation in Nero Burning ROM we can see the usual 'New Compilation' window in which we can see a new type of compilation, HD-BURN. When selecting the HD-BURN type we have the following options:

For our review we used the HD-BURN-ROM (ISO) option and tried to burn a compilation of around 1340MB. Unfortunately our results were less than encouraging. The first CD-R (manufactured by CMC Magnetics) we tried burning gave us a track focussing error while the second disc we tried (manufactured by Mitsumi) did burn ok but could not be read in the Sanyo drive after it had been burned!

Because the Sanyo drive didn't perform very well with HD-BURN we tried upgrading its firmware to version 2.09 (which we found here, on the Optorite website). Please note that all other tests we did in this review were done with firmware 2.09.

After upgrading the firmware of the Sanyo CRD-BPDV2 recorder we again tried burning a HD-BURN-ROM compilation, using the same Mitsumi media as before and the same amount of data:

As you can see the compilation was recorded fine and this time the recorded disc could be read in the Sanyo drive (we, by the way, of course also tried reading the HD-BURN disc created with firmware 2.07 which resulted in an incorrect function error when trying to access the disc):

Pretty impressive, 1.3GB on a standard 700MB disc! We then tried a transfer rate test in Nero CD/DVD Speed. In the screenshot below you can see that the CD-R disc was detected as DVD-R disc:

You can see that the Sanyo achieved a top read speed of 8.79x, which is equal to around 80x CD reading (roughly 12MB/s).

CopyToCD/DVD:

Another software package that supports HD-BURN is VSO-Software's CopyToCD/DVD. After installing the software we can find a new option in the Windows shell with which you can easily copy files to a disc. Just click on the files you want to burn, right mouse click on them and select Copy To CD:

We selected the same files as in our Nero Burning ROM tests (1340MB). After selecting the files and the Copy To CD option we can see the following screen. CopyToDVD automatically enables HD-BURN when the amount of data that has to be burned is more than 700MB:

For the CopyToCD/DVD test we again used some Mitsumi media. We got an error when we wanted to use the CMC Magnetics media (medium error), the same as we saw with the Nero Burning ROM tests. After the disc had finished recording (and a sweet English voice with a French accent told us 'your CD is ready' ;)) we could read the disc in the Sanyo drive.

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