Review of Sony DRU-700A Dual Layer DVD burner... (1 Viewer)

[Max Leung]

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.html?i=2045

According to the review, it should retail or street for $200 US. That's pretty cheap! Unfortunately, media will be scarce until October, or so the article speculates. :frowning:

 

[brentl]

I remember how early I was as an adopter to Cd writers, but I can't keep up with the changes going on.

Don't know if I have a need for a DVD burner, I can't even fill up CDRs, but when prices drop for dual layer I'll probably pick one up and skip over the current stuff.

I'm kind of suprised with no Mount Rainier support, but I guess most players don't offer this, too bad.

Brent

 

[Rob Gillespie]

Having just have a Sony die on me after just over a year, I'm not about to buy anotehr of their DVD writers. My new Pioneer x8 burner will do for a while. I'll get a dual-layer burner once the second generation of equipment has come out and once the media is readily available and proven.

 

[DaveGTP]

Too bad the media is going to be pricey $$ and rare for a while. I'd even take 1x dual layer discs if they were a good deal - honestly, I don't care how fast the burner is for DVDs. I only set it going when I'm in bed/at work/etc anyway.

 

[Rob Gillespie]

x8 media came out last week over here and was initially about £24 for 25 Ritek-dye disks. Seven days later they're down at £15 for the same amount.

Price will just depend on how much people want them.

 

[Brian Teal]

I'll definitely upgrade to a DL burner, but from the looks of this one I will have to wait until the second round of burners. No thanks to 45+ minute burns.

 

[Max Leung]

Personally, I think 45 minute burns is just fine. In fact, the faster you burn the higher chance of errors anyways.

I'm more concerned about media reliability, and Rob is justified in waiting for reliable burners too. Those are much better reasons to wait than for a measly 45 minutes.

 

[Rob Gillespie]

That hasn't been my experience Max, in fairness. As long as you keep to the specs (i.e. not burning a x4 at x8!) then there should be no read errors at all and no skipping on standalone players. Anything less is a fault, either with the media or the burner.

I wont buy another Sony burner. It would burn x4 media often at x2, though they always worked OK. I got a couple of hundred blanks made by a company named Optodisc. Got them cheap - a mere 26p each. The Sony would often fail to burn them and those that did finish would stutter on video playback. Great, I though, I've wasted all that money. Roll forward a few weeks when I took delivery of the Pioneer - it burns every one perfeclty with no playback problems whatsoever.

 

[Christ Reynolds]

that hasnt been my experience either. i suppose in theory it is correct, but the error correction of dvds is pretty good, so if there are any disc errors, i havent seen them. the only time i will burn a disc at slower than maximum is if the destination drive is an older audio player. otherwise, i havent seen any noticeable clicks or drops in quality.

CJ

 

[Mike_J_Potter]

Quote:
that hasnt been my experience either. i suppose in theory it is correct, but the error correction of dvds is pretty good, so if there are any disc errors, i havent seen them. the only time i will burn a disc at slower than maximum is if the destination drive is an older audio player. otherwise, i havent seen any noticeable clicks or drops in quality."

Agreed I think the problem with errors is mostly caused by buffer under runs at too high of burn speeds
on slower pcs, but now the drives have bigger buffers and the PC's are faster now. I know even my 2ghz with allot of stuff running had a little bit of a problem but nero saved the disc from becoming a coaster. No problems with my new 2.8ghz though I am haven't done allot of cds.

 

[Rob Gillespie]

Buffer underruns are usually caused by IDE bandwidth issues rather than processor speed (unless it's getting really silly). If you've got a lot of hard drive activity going on then the buffer can empty right down, but that said, I think practically all DVD burners come with Burn-Proof anyway.

Some buners are simply more accurate and tolerant than others - as I found out.

 

[DaveGTP]

That mention of Optodiscs working on your Pioneer but not on your Sony -

I had a spindle of 15 Optodiscs. I burned them on my Pioneer A06. Many of them would stutter at least twice during playback, and that was burned at 2x or 1x! @ 4x they were ever more erratic (although no outright coasters, just discs so erratic they might as well have been coasters).


My experience and understanding was that lower speeds generally = lower errors. I'm not talking "the player skips" errors, I'm talking errors found by scanning the disc for both major and minor errors. Higher rates of minor errors on faster burns.


I switched over to Ritek from those POS Optodiscs. Trust me, it wasn't just the Sony drive!

 

[Max Leung]

It seems media quality is a big factor when burning dvds. In fact, I've seen packs of 4x DVD-Rs with warnings on them not to burn them at slow speeds. Maybe that is why you are having trouble Rob - burning 2.4x on your Sony on 4x media that should only be burnt at 4x?

So, let's modify the strategy: Burn at the minimum possible speed rating of the media at hand.

Boy I can't wait to see how many new problems we'll get with dual-layer discs... :b

 

[Chris]

I received a Dual Layer burner Friday. So far, so good. The media has mixed compatibility with the players in my household. So, that's a negative. I also can't find any real source of media outside of the initial 5 discs I received along with.

I'm not sure when any volume will exist on these.

 

[Max Leung]

Which burner did you get, what media did you test with, and what players do you own? That could help us make an informed decision when these burners arrive in mass. Thanks for being the Guinea Pig.

 

[Rob Gillespie]

I only ever burn at the 'proper' speed. I've tried going slower on troublesome media before but it makes no difference.

 

[Mike_G]

Media's out. Best Buy sells them in 2-packs for $30, or a pack of 12 (10 R's, 1 RW, 1 +R-DL) for $30. 2 years ago I started working on backing up some of my laserdiscs. One project in particular I kept around in the hopes that dual layer media would be out soon.

This time, I was able to use the raw PCM audio (YAY!) instead of compressing it with Dolby Digital. So, 1.36 GB for audio, and about 6.7 GB for video. I told Final Cut Pro to use an average bit rate of 6.7 Mb/sec with a max of 9.0 and a two-pass conversion. Worked like a charm. No more blocky compression!

The problem is that DVD Studio Pro does NOT recognize the drive as usable, even though Toast does, but I didn't trust Toast to not burn a coaster; it saw the disk had 8GB available, but didn't say anything about the drive itself being dual-layer. Since Nero on the PC does support the drive properly, I moved the drive to my PC and burned the project there. Worked perfectly, except the layer break was off by a few seconds (could have been my fault...I ran through the project setup a little too fast).

It burned overnight so I don't know how long it took.

Mike

 

[Chris]

I have the sony DVD DRU-700.

Players in my household:

Panasonic CV37
Apex player (it's already packed and moving)
Sony 300-disc Changer

I've also tried the discs on the Sony Psyche and Panasonic F85, and Polaroid (el-cheapo) player.

Compatibility is about 70%. I still haven't come up with any more discs then what I originally received (the 5) so, hard to test further.

 

[Patrick Sun]

Newegg was offering the NEC ND2510 for around $90-$100, which will do 2.4x on DVD+R-DLs. I am still waiting for blank DVD-DLs to come down in price before buying one of these DVD-DL burners.

That layer break consideration is going to haunt me, I just know it.

 

[Max Leung]

Ugh, 70% compatibility is terrible. It was nightmare enough finding the right brand of media that would work in a regular DVD player.

Some reviews said they had 80% compatibility with the media bundled with the DL DVD writer. I guess that's not much different compared to CD players back when CD-R/RWs were introduced. But still, like you said Patrick, the layer break handling is gonna be scary.