Philips DVDRW885 Dual layer DVD-Writer

Positive:

• Supports 2.4x DVD+R Dual Layer writing
• Supports 8x DVD+R speed.
• Supports 4x DVD+RW speed.
• Among the faster 8x DVD-writers for writing discs.
• Very good writing quality and speed with DVD+R media.
• Supports dynamic OPC that adjusts writing strategy while writing.
• Supports DAO-RAW writing.
• Supports reading and writing of full SubChannel Data.
• Supports reading and writing 8cm CD-R discs and credit card CD-R discs.
• Good reading speed with most types of media, including DVD-Video discs.
• Good seek times.
• Fast and perfect audio extraction.
• Supports reading and writing 99 minutes CD-R discs.
• Supports bitsetting for all types of DVD+R/R DL/RW media and automatically sets booktype to DVD-ROM for all these media.
• Fancy and useful LED setup on the front.

Negative:

• Does not support DVD-R/RW out of the box (will be added through a firmware upgrade in September this year).
• Slow at CD-R and CD-RW writing.
• Does not support Mt. Rainier.
• Slow at extracting data from protected audio discs.
• Doesn’t support ‘Correct EFM encoding of regular bit patterns” making it harder for it to backup safedisc protected games.

Conclusion:

Overall the drive is quite decent, but feels a bit rushed to the market as it does not support DVD-R and DVD-RW out of the box. Anyway let us summarize the most important positive and negative points below

 The main positive points: The first thing that comes to mind will of course be that it supports dual layer writing, a new and exciting technology. Just too bad that dual layer media is not available at reasonable prices yet, we guess it will be 6 Months or so before dual layer media will be priced somewhat decent. The next thing that comes to mind is that it is pretty fast at 8x DVD+R writing and has very good writing quality with DVD+R media, much thanks to the dynamic OPC. It does also write several types of 4x DVD+R media at 8x, and add bitsetting support to this and you have a very good drive if you are only interested in using DVD+R/RW/R DL media.

The main negative points: Although there are few serious flaws with this drive there are some points that we want to mention; First it was advertised to support DVD-R/RW but upon release Philips decided to add this later by a firmware upgrade, seems like they dropped it to rush the drive out on the market? Or maybe they did it in favour of the DVD+R/RW format that they are the main developer of? Beside this it’s very slow at CD-R and CD-RW writing compared to most other new drives. And last; the drive is not the best drive for backing up protected data and audio discs, as it’s slow and does not support all techniques.

The drive has a list price of € 129 EUR.

To sum it all up, this is the best we could say: ‘A safe choice if your main concern is DVD+R/RW writing speed/quality as well as dual layer DVD+R support”. But since it does not offer anything very special beside dual layer support as well as lacking DVD-R/RW support out of the box we do not feel that it deserves any awards. If it had been faster at CD-R/CD-RW writing and had DVD-R/RW support out of the box the situation would have been different. 

You may discuss/comment this review below or in this forum thread.

Thanks to:

 For providing the media used in this review. Conrexx technology is the supplier of Traxdata media as well as other media for whole Europe.

 For providing the That’s Write media used in this review. That’s Write focus on providing quality media at reduced prices in Europe.

 For providing some of the Memorex media used in this review. Memorex is one of the largest providers of all types of media for larger parts of the world.