Review Feedback

[Ian]

Suggestions? Things you'd like to see in future reviews?

[RJW]

I would put my suggestions over here.

DVD quality tests
add Beta (assymetry) test - PX-712/PX-716
add Jitter tests with Benq 1620 (CDSPEED)

Now I know that would result in a lot of testing time. In return this testing methode at least the early results of people who have done all tests seem to be able to make allmost just a good judgement as the overpriced profesional equipement. Only real problem is that it costs huge ammounts of time. And you have a excellent point in the px-716 topic that if you want to keep up reviews with the current appearance rate of drives that it might be not possible or very hard to do.

Also I think alexnoe has made a tool which can do all the plextor measurements in one go or am I wrong.
IF this is the case and it can be combined with Benq in cd-speed) you got 2 out however you would loose the consistancy of K-probe. So I leave that open to you. Since it 's your review and all options have some goods and bads.


Please keep in mind that Plextors beta test is probally more imporant as Benqs jitter.
Because from the plextor drive it is know it matches profesional analyzers and the fluctuations from plextor drive to plextor drive seem to be ignorable.
Benq's jitter however has reported to be unreliable by Audiodev/ C't( who also report all other stuff as unreliable compared to profesional CATS-SA 300 except for Plextors beta) and to reliable by some users who had contact with benq about it. Keep in mind that both views might be coloured. So I think it's somewhere in the middle or the drives variations and the no calibration factor might have screwed things up.

Maybe cdrinfo should actually look at that one if they want to play with overpriced stuff. Since it would be of more value as there current CATS vs drive tests. Which do are not ussefull but just look fancy. Yeah they add zero when it comes to information. But then again that's something for them.

Also It might be nice to make a table overview with the burn quality

Something like for all factors.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
MID -- speed burned--time--PI-PO--beta low--beta high--jitter-


Offcourse if you want to use extra scanners for Pi/PO/POF you could add them. Infact if you really want to help people on very small band with
you could actually link the pictures. So normally it's just the table if they
want to see the scan then click on that part.


Ohyeah we European people also have huge problems with audio protections cdfreaks and cdrinfo take these a long for testing. Why I know that the problem is less in America when it comes to protected media it might be nice if this could be added. However keep in mind that this one has a very low priority since it's one of the few things most European magazines allready seem to understand (unlike allmost any other testing aspect.) and if people are that interested they can allways have a quick look in one of these at ther local book shop library. But I just put it here for completeness.

These are just the current things that come to mind if other stuff comes up I will let you know.

I think that most other points have allready been said on the Px-716 topic and please keep up the good work.

[hoxlund]

what the maximum weight the tray can hold when its ejected

that should only be used for btc/nec drives

[MediumRare]

I've been meaning to add my 2 cents for a while. These are mainly things I've already mentioned at various times.
- I'd like to see some quality scans with rewritable discs too (CD and DVD)
- If a drive is capable of doing some kind of quality test (C!/C2, PI/PIF, jitter, beta or whatever) it would be nice to see how it does with some standard discs. I elaborated on this in this post.
- I really appreciate the detailed media tests (KProve, transfer rates, BenQ+CD-Speed). But as we all know, not all (DVD) media is burned at it's rated speed. The actual speed at which a drive did the burn are tabulated earlier in the reviews, but you have to keep scrolling back and forth to get at the information. So it would be really useful to repeat this in the caption to the scans. For example, in the latest test of the NEC ND-3520A:
RiDATA 8x DVD+R
(RITEKR03)
(4x, 13:13)

I really appreciate the continuity in your tests. It makes it possible to compare current drives with those that were discussed years ago!

G

[MediumRare]

I forgot this in the previous post:
The newer versions of CD-Speed allow you to burn a Nero *.nrg image instead of generated garbage during the "create data disc" test and add the transfer rate image to the disc. This is shown on a subsequent quality scan together with the drive model and firmware. I think this is a really neat feature and would be the way to go in writing your test discs unless you have other reasons for doing it differently (e.g. "real world" performance which may stress your hard drive or using various burning applications).

G