kahn used our news submit to tell us "I"m sure some of the media quality freaks from the forums will have a few negative things to say about this review 🙂 "
Well, I
know one thing, the person doing the tests really had a lot of medias to try,
but they only used a Lite-On drive. However, this is a lot of work to do
and I wouldn't want to do it! We have to give the guy a thanks for posting this comparison, it's some 24 pages long and he looks at quite a few types and brands of media!
 Testbed and Methods
We took a Lite-On SOHW-1653S (firmware revision CS09) as our etalon of an optical drive. We made this choice basing on the fact that drives from Lite-On are widely available on the market, under Lite-On's own brand as well as under other company's badges. For example, the SOHW-1653S is in fact identical to such models as Lite-On SOHW-1633S, Sony DW-U22A, and Teac DV-W516A. Another reason for our choosing this Lite-On for this test session was the compatibility of this drive with Nero CD-DVD Speed. The KProbe utility that we use for scanning the surface of the written disc also supports Lite-On's drives. Of course, high-quality burning comes as the result of a harmonious combination of a drive and a disc, but we will be evaluating the quality of the tested discs basing on their performance in one particular drive due to the above-explained reasons. We use two programs to scan the written DVDs to obtain objective results and also to understand their operation better with more media and to ultimately answer the question which program is more efficient and correct. 
So, we copied a DVD Video movie from its ISO image on the hard disk drive to the tested disc and scanned the disc after that. The configuration of our computer was like follows: - Intel Bonanza D875PBZ mainboard;
- Intel Pentium 4 2.8GHz CPU;
- IBM DTLA-307015 HDD, 15GB;
- GeForce2 MX400 64MB graphics card;
- 512MB DDR SDRAM;
- Microsoft Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 1 and DirectX 9.0b.
We attached the optical drive to the second IDE channel as 'Master". The following software was used in the tests: - Nero Burning ROM version 6.6.0.1
- Nero CD-DVD Speed 3.61
- DVD Identifier 3.6.2
- KProbe 2 version 2.4.2
The DVD-RW/+RW discs were recorded at the maximum speed they are rated for by their manufacturers. If this information was unavailable, we determined it practically, finding the maximum possible speed. The subsequent scanning of the written discs was performed at a constant speed of 4x. |
You can discuss this testing procedure in our DVD Media Tests Forum if you want to give your two cents worth or talk about this some more.
Source: X-Bit Labs
