0ur shootouts reflect a pattern: features and performance are always getting better, and prices are always falling. It's no different this time. It's been
almost a year and a half since we last tested DVD Writers, and this time round, you guessed
it prices have
fallen, and features
and performance
have improved! But
we must tell you that
DVD Writers have
reached the theoretical
speed limits of DVD¬
Writing. Also, it no
longer makes sense to
get a Combo drive or a
CD Writer: a DVD Writer
costs just a few hundred rupees extra. Go get yourself one right now!
Oh, wait. What brand, and what model? Well, you'll figure that one out by the time you're through
reading this test.
We can hear a few of you asking, why even those few hundred rupees extra? The idea is that you have nothing to lose. A CD costs about Rs 12; a DVD costs between Rs 20 and Rs 40, giving you much more MB per rupee. Besides, we're urging you to back up all your important data, which means much of your hard drive which could typically be anything between 40 and 200 GB. Imagine how many CDs you'd need to back up all that!
If you're wondering "Why back up," you probably haven't been reading Digit. We mention at least once in every issue that you should be backing up! You can't depend on your hard disk. It could crash any time, and for no apparent reason. Sure, your DVD could get scratched, but at least you can control whether it gets scratched or not.
Then there's the issue of dual layer. Movies, especially those from abroad, are often on duallayer DVDs and if you've imported a DVD movie, you'd certainly want to back it up.
We could go on and on about why you need a DVD Writer, but let's cut the spiel short and get to the tests!
We reviewed 16 DVD Writers for you this month. The drives we received came from Asus, BenQ, Gigabyte, LG, Lite On, Plextor, Samsung, and Sony. Of these, four were external drives, and the rest were internal IDE drives. This test is therefore in two sections internal and external drives.
Segregation was possible only into these two categories, unlike in our last shootout, where singlelayer and dual layer drives were in two different categories. This time, all the drives were capable of writing to dual layer media.
DVD Formats
When you buy a DVD Writer. you'll see a host of supported formats mentioned on the box, and you'll probably wonder what these are and what formats you need support for. That's why we put in this section.
We start off by listing out the available formats: DVD ROM, DVD R, DVD+R, DVD+R DL, DVD R DL, DVD RW, DVD+RW, and DVDRAM. ( DU stands for dual layer ) While DVD ROM is a read only DVD format, the rest are writeable DVD formats.
DVD R, developed by Pioneer, was the first DVD recording format compatible with standalone DVD players. It is a nonrewriteable format and is compatible with 93 per cent of all DVD players and DVD ROMs, and holds 4.37 GB of data. DVDRW is a re writeable version of DVD R, but is compatible with fewer devices. It allows for about a thousand writes, after which it may not be usable.
DVD+R was developed separately from DVD R, and is less
compatible across various DVD drives and players than DVD R is. DVD+RW is a rewriteable version of DVD+R, and both these have the same capacity 4.37 GB. These formats have been strongly backed by Sony and HP.
Then there are DVD R DL and DVD+R DL, the dual layer formats, which have capacities of 8.5 GB. They are nothing but DVD R and DVD+R with two layers to store data. They require drives that support these formats, which are quite common today.
Finally, DVD RAM is a format that allows repeated recording and erasing, but it enjoys the lowest compatibility amongst all the DVD formats it is supported by only a select few drives. DVDRAM discs are typically housed in cartridges. This format supports 4.7 GB, which is the highest capacity in the DVD realm. DVD RAM discs find application mainly in real time video capture.
In addition to this and we hope we're not adding to the confusion each of these media has a double sided version, which you can think of as two discs with the label sides stuck together you can flip them over and write on the other side. Naturally, they have twice the capacity of the single sided media, but they're hard to find.
