Philips DVDRW824

While the DVD industry is still plagued with both the plus and minus formats, Philips has released the DVDRW824 solely for the former. The company believes 90 per cent of all drives produced are capable of reading +R/+RW media and sees it as the more robust format.

Aside from offering ultra-quick eight-speed DVD+RW writing, the DVDRW824 also features what Philips calls Thermo-Balanced Writing, to improve the quality of your DVDs. The Walking OPC (optimum power control) gauges variables, such as the temperature of the drive, to optimise writing quality. While the Tilt Correction feature adjusts the angle at which the OPU (optical pickup unit) fires the laser, so it's always at 90 deg to the disc itself. With cheap DVDs, a certain level of warping is quite common, making this a particularly useful feature.

The only problem with these techniques is that they have to interrupt the writing process every so often to adjust the settings. This adds a couple of seconds to the writing time. However, during testing, the DVDRW824 managed to write 4.7GB in an impressive eight minutes, including a preparation time of 74 seconds. It took just over 13 minutes to write the same amount to +RW media since the speed reduces to four-speed.

Although Philips has decided to take a stand in the dreaded DVD format battle, it has also made this new drive a non-starter for people who want the flexibility of both standards. Until either +RW or -RW comes out on top, we'd still prefer to have a drive that's capable of writing both. What's more, there are some dual format drives coming on to the market that are capable of eight-speed DVD +R/-R, such as the NEC ND2500A, which is available for around £50 cheaper than this effort from Philips.

Contact: Philips 020 7949 0069
www.philips.com

Specifications:

• 8x DVD+R, 4x DVD+-R, 12x DVD-Rom
• 24x CD-R, 10x CD-RW, 40x CD-Rom
• Walking OPC, Tilt Control
• 2MB buffer
• Nero 5.5, Sonic Solutions Trial disc