Since this is
a pre-release sample it came in a white box with no software or anything. Only
the drive itself and the dl media plus a disc containing the latest Nero
CD/DVD-Speed 2.20 as well as a short description of the drive (specifications
and test results).
Now it’s time
to take a look at the drive itself:
A pretty plain
looking front bezel we may say, this is also one of the few drives that still
has the play/next track button.
Out from the
sticker we could clearly see that this is a sample drive. Serial number ‘4″
sounds promising
On the back of
the drive there are from the left: two undocumented pins; digital audio
connector; analogue audio connector; pins and jumper to set the drive to cable
select, slave or master; IDE connector and power connector.
We quickly
installed the drive without any problems and here is a screenshot from Nero info
tool:
Our drive came
shipped with firmware B4A8, and there is no firmware upgrades available yet. As
we could see it supports dual layer reading and writing.
And another
shot from Nero Burning ROM:
Well, since we
had the DL disc in the drive we could see that it only supports 2.4x DVD+R DL writing speed.
Let’s take a
long jump over all the other usual tests and go directly to the DL media BenQ shipped with the drive.
The
disc:
Not much to show
really. ;) But let us run the disc through some media identifiers to find out
more about the disc:
The disc is
manufactured by Mitsubishi. The media code is MKM 001,
if anyone wonders what MKM is short for; it is short
for Mitsubishi Kagaku Media.
And here is the
media information from DVDinfoPRO.
And finally a shot
from Nero showing the actual capacity of the disc.
Continue to the
last page to read about the writing process and disc
compatibility…
Ok, so under the "Read" specs, it says it supports reading DVD-10 and DVD-18. Are these just 10 and 18 gig sized DVDs? I've never heard of this spec, but I haven't followed very closely the past year or so.
DVD-18 DVD-18 in an acronym that means a two-sided DVD disc with two layers of data on both sides of the disc -- in other terms, it is a two-sided disc that holds DVD-9 disc on both sides of it. DVD-18 disc can contain upto 15.9 gigabytes of data on it (with 7.95 gigabytes on each side). Other regular DVD size acronyms are: -DVD-5 -DVD-9 -DVD-10 -DVD-14 DVD-14 DVD-14 is an oddball format that doesn't really exist anymore, but was used for a short period of time back in late 1990s and in early years of new millennium when manufacturing of DVD-18 discs was complicated and expensive. DVD-14 is a two-sided DVD disc that has one side which contains single layer of data and one side which contains two layers of data. In easier terms, the other side of the disc is DVD-5 and the other side of the disc is DVD-9. DVD-14 disc can hold upto 12.33 gigabytes of data. DVD-10 DVD-10 means a two-sided DVD disc that hold single data layer on both sides. Effectively this means that DVD-10 is a dual-sided DVD-5 and can hold 8.75 gigabytes of data with 4.38 gigabytes on each side. Two-sided discs need to be flipped over in order to access the other data side. Unfortunately many blank DVD media advertisers mislead customers to believe that these discs are actually blank DVD-9 discs in hope that they could copy their dual-layer discs directly to blank discs. But as dual-layer writable blank media is impossible to create, customers get misled. DVD-9 One form of DVD discs that means a single-sided dual-layer DVD disc. DVD-9 can hold approximately 7.95 gigabytes of data, even though marketers like to use the 8.5GB value instead, but this is misleading and is calculated by using so-called "Japanese gigabytes" which means that gigabyte is calculated as 1,000 megabytes, but in real computer terminology, gigabyte is 1,024 megabytes. DVD-9 DVD-Video discs are problematic for DVD-R owners, because writable DVD discs can only hold the same amount of data that DVD-5 discs contain, due technical reasons. DVD-5 DVD-5 is an acronym that means a DVD disc that is one-sided single-layer disc and can contain upto 4.38 gigabytes of data on it. DVD disc manufacturers love to use marketing terms and sell their discs as 4.7GB discs, but this is not true -- the 4.7GB is calculated by using so-called "Japanese gigabytes", where the power of calculations is 1,000 instead of 1,024 (and 1.024 is the correct way to calculate everything in computer world -- so, 1024 megabytes == 1 gigabyte). DVD-5 DVD-Video discs are nice, because DVD writers (this applies to both, DVD-R and DVD+R standards) can only write single layer discs.
