Pioneer DVR-110D DVD Burner Review

Reading performance:

For these tests we will use Nero CD/DVD-Speed to read various CD and DVD’s, including audio discs and DVD-media. As already mentioned in the introduction, this drive supports:

• DVD-ROM : 16x
• CD-ROM : 40x 

Pressed discs:

For this test we used a pressed CD-ROM disc containing the Roxio Media Creator 7 install CD that is close to 75 minutes in length. Below you will see the produced result:

The Pioneer DVR-110D reached 41.99x which is beyond its stated read speed of 40x, and will reach faster speeds on a full disc. Let’s compare the result in the table below:

The Pioneer DVR-110D performed average reading pressed CD-ROM.

* Some drives including the NU HDW-164 will simply execute the seek command without actually moving the pickup.

CD-Recordable Discs:

For this test we made a copy of the original Roxio Media Creator 7 install CD. The disc we used was a Ricoh 52X certified CD-R disc manufactured by Moser Baer India. 

Again the Pioneer DVR-110D performed around average on CD-R read test.

* Some drives including the NU HDW-164 will simply execute the seek command without actually moving the pickup.

 CD-Rewritable discs:

Again, we made a copy of the original Roxio Media Creator 7 install CD; this time we used a Verbatim Ultra Speed (32X) CD-RW disc made by Mitsubishi Chemicals Corporation.

As we can see above, the Pioneer DVR-110D is locked at 32x, reading CD-RW; now let us compare it to other drives below.

The Pioneer DVR-110D proved fairly slow at reading CD-RW’s. The seek times however, are quite good.

* Some drives including the NU HDW-164 will simply execute the seek command without actually moving the pickup.

Audio ‘“ Digital Audio Extraction:

To test the digital audio extraction performance of the Pioneer DVR-110D, again we used Nero CD/DVD-Speed to measure the transfer rate. The audio disc we used is slightly larger than the disc used for the other tests, to be exact it’s was 78 minutes in length (78:53:31).

The Pioneer CDR-110D went beyond its maximum rated speed of 40x and actually reached 42.38x; let us compare the result with other drives:

The Pioneer DVR-110D performed around average on the Audio-CD.

* Some drives including the NU HDW-164 will simply execute the seek command without actually moving the pickup.

For this test we used EAC (Exact Audio Copy) to test the drives Audio extraction performance. As we can see from the screenshot below the drive supports ‘caching” which can have an adverse effect on Audio extraction performance. Also worth noting, the drive does not support ‘C2 error info” with EAC. 

Below is the results produced by EAC:

 Burst mode

 Secure mode

The drive performed well in burst mode but performed poorly in secure mode.

Advanced audio ‘“ DAE quality test:

Before we move on to testing DVD read speeds, we will take a last audio test, and this time we used the ‘Advanced DAE Quality Test” feature in CD-Speed. For this test we used a CD-R media from RICOH (Thanks to RICOH Europe (BV) for sending us this media).

The extracting quality is excellent but the drive proved to slow for ‘on the fly copying” beyond 4x. Also reading of lead-in and lead-out were also not supported.

DVD reading performance:

Again, we will use Nero CD-Speed to measure the reading performance, this time for various types of DVD discs. The drive should read pressed single layer DVD-discs at 16X.

DVD ‘“ DVD-Video:

For our DVD reading performance tests we are going to start with a single and Double Layered DVD video discs. While only 1X speed is required to watch DVD movies, it’s useful to be able to read the discs at higher speeds if you’re going to extract (rip) the content of the disc to your hard drive.

DVD-Video Single Layer

 
DVD-Video Double Layer

The DVR-110D is not RIPLOCKED and reads a pressed DVD-Video at up to 16x for a Single Layer disc, and at up to 13x for a Double Layer disc. This makes the DVR-110D a fast DVD-Video ripper.

Now let us test a pressed DVD-ROM disc. For this test we used the Plextor PX-716 install DVD, which is around 4.37 Gigabyte in size.

The DVR-110D will reach 16x on DVD-ROM’s.

The Pioneer DVR-110D performed very well with our DVD-Video tests. It was among the fastest drives at reading a pressed SL DVD-Video disc. And the fastest drive at reading a DL pressed DVD-Video disc.

DVD ‘“ DVD+R:

For this test we used a Maxell (Taiyo Yuden) 4X DVD+R and a Verbatim 8X DVD+RW with about 4.4Gb of data. Below are the results:

DVD+R

 
DVD+RW

The Pioneer DVR-110D performed averagely on DVD+R and DVD+RW, returning respectable results. Now let us see how it will perform on DVD-R/RW.

DVD ‘“ DVD-R/RW:

For this test we used a DAXON 16X DVD-R disc and a Verbatim 6X DVD-RW disc filled with about 4.4Gb of data. Our test results are found below:

DVD-R

 
DVD-RW

There are minor differences compared to reading the DVD+R/RW discs, but they are very marginal differences.

Once again the Pioneer DVR-110D was average at reading DVD-R/RW.

DVD-RAM

For this test we used a Emgeton 3x DVD-RAM disc, and below is our result:

The Pioneer DVR-110D reads DVD-RAM media at 2x, and read our test disc without problems.

Overall thoughts:

The Pioneer DVR-110D is a respectable reader, it’s not the fastest reader in the world, but during our read tests it proved reliable. Pressed DL DVD-Video read speeds were very impressive and it does have the advantage of being able to read DVD-RAM media.

Overall the reading performance of the Pioneer DVR-110D should not disappoint the end user.

But now it’s time to head on to a more interesting part: Writing CD-R and CD-RW discs…