Pioneer DVR-108D - Crowning a new Champion
by Kristopher Kubicki on August 31, 2004 12:02 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Introduction
When we first heard the announcement that the Pioneer DVR-108 was on sale, but only at a few retail merchants, we jumped. The DVDR scene has been fairly quiet since the introduction of the last round on Sanyo based burners (MSI DR12A, Sony DRU-540A, Plextor PX-712A) and thus, we had been waiting for something really to sink our teeth into. Fortunately, we were able to get our hands on one of the first Pioneer drives to hit the shelves, and we have been working diligently to benchmark that drive, while at the same time, re-benchmarking some of our older drives with new media.16X, dual layer drives sound incredibly attractive, but since dual layer media still costs several dollars a disc and 16X media exists only in the fantasies of a few hardware manufacturers, we are going to have to approach our testing of the DVR-108D as a 12X review. We have included some DVD DL media for completeness as well. Oh, and the most exciting thing about this drive? It retails for nearly the same price as the DVR-107D, well under $100.
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KristopherKubicki - Tuesday, August 31, 2004 - link
Degrador, fixed, thanks.Kristopher
Degrador - Tuesday, August 31, 2004 - link
Bitsetting basically describes what type of disc it is (only matters for DVD+R(W) and DL discs). Having a drive able to let you set the bitsetting means you can write discs that seem to be DVD-ROM discs not writables, and so old dvd-players can handle them better.Another thing I noticed in the article, the image shows the Ritek R03 discs burnt at only 4X on the Pioneer, yet you say "Even at that ambitious burn ..." and "the Pioneer wins this bout both in speed and write quality". Wrong image link perhaps?
KristopherKubicki - Tuesday, August 31, 2004 - link
saechaka: someone said a hacked 3500A firmware supports bitsetting. I think its a pretty moot issue nowadays but some people find it really important.Kristopher
saechaka - Tuesday, August 31, 2004 - link
what's the significance of this bitsetting? and will the 3500a be able to utilize that feature? thanksDegrador - Tuesday, August 31, 2004 - link
Under the features table, you have the drive listed as writing DVD-RAM at 2X. This drive actually doesn't support writing DVD-RAM, only reading.Perhaps another thing of note is that the retail version has better noise management / control than the OEM version.
Also, is there any chance of doing some benchmarks with the newly released 1.10 firmware?
Thanks
Budman - Tuesday, August 31, 2004 - link
Pioneer DVD burners Rule!!