Dual Format Burners Have Finally Arrived, And This One's a Peach
Written: Nov 18 '03
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Pros: A solid burner with great media and software compatibility.
Cons: Regular CDR burn speed (16X) is only moderate.
The Bottom Line: An excellent dual format burner that worked smoothly with all the media and software I tried it against. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it.
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| dnyberg's Full Review: Pioneer DVR 106 DVD±RW Burner |
As I write this, we're fast approaching the 03 holiday season, and dual mode DVD burners are finally sliding into the price range most of us are comfortable with. Only a year ago, when the first dual mode drive appeared, buyers could expect to pay $500 to be the first on their block to not care whether +R or -R would win the format war. Now name brand burners can be found for about 1/3 that cost. Combining that with the gradual but continuing drop in media cost, I recently decided it was time to take the plunge, so I bought a Pioneer DVR-106 burner. (When I made my final choice, it came down to the Sony 510 drives vs the Pioneer *06, which are extremely similar models. I finally tipped in favor of the Pioneer because of a few reports I've seen on the net regarding early failures by some of the Sonys. I do not know if that's a widespread or ongoing problem, but the Sonys and Pioneers are generally so close in all other respects that I opted for the Pioneer.) I'm very happy I finally did spring for this burner, as I'm quite pleased with it.
There's some confusion in the market regarding the Pioneer model A06 and 106 DVD burners. These are the exact same drives; the only difference is the A06 is sold in retail packaging with some starter software, while the 106 is sold as a bare drive, OEM packed (only a printed user's manual is included). The typical price difference between these two packages, when I shopped, was $60 (almost 1/3 the cost of the retail package), so I opted for the bare drive.
The various speeds DVD burners operate at can be a confusing list; I'll try to group these numbers so they read easily:
The *06 will burn +R and -R DVD at 4X, +RW at 2.4X, and -RW at 2X. These are the numbers most of us are most interested in at this early stage of the DVD burner market.
It will of course also burn regular CDR, and it does that at 16X, and CDRW at 10X.
Read speeds for +R and -R are 6X, and dual layer factory DVDs read at 8X while single layer discs read at 12X. (Most new movies, it seems, are dual layer lately.)
Regular CDs, either pressed or burned, read at 32X.
The short form of all that is that the *06 is "a 4X dual format burner" that will also serve well as a general purpose reading drive, and adequately at burning regular CDRs. (Given the cost of DVDR vs CDR media now, I'll be using mine almost entirely with DVDR.) So this drive would serve acceptably as the only drive in a new system, if that's the way one wanted to go.
Okay, now that that part's out of the way, let's get on to the more interesting stuff.
The *06 has of course the same form factor as just about any other drive you've ever seen, notable mainly for its very plain front panel. All markings are molded into the beige plastic, no inked printing. There's one green status LED that illuminates when either reading or writing is underway. If there were one tiny change I'd have liked to see, I wish it were dual color (red for burning and green for reading like my beloved Lite-On CD burner), but I have to call that a very tiny quibble. A subtle and hardly unique, but none the less pleasant feature is that the functions of the back side jumpers are stamped onto the enclosure, so you don't have to chase down the manual to figure out how to set the master/slave/cable jumpers. You probably will need a magnifier, though; those stamped markings are pretty faint. The jumpers are regular size, so you won't need tweezers to set them. Fingers will do. I like that.
One tip: don't forget to set the IDE controller you attach to this drive (or any burner, for that matter) to "dma if available" and reboot. DVD burners consume a lot more data per second than CD burners, and immediately after install, Windows will probably default to PIO mode. UDMA will save you a huge amount of CPU load, and greatly reduce the risk of a buffer underrun and the resulting coaster. I've found that burning a DVD at 4X uses only about 20% of a P3/600, so buyers with a more modern CPU should have no problem at all feeding data to the burner fast enough to avoid underrun.
The *06 is, as you would expect of a major player such as Pioneer, widely supported by common software applications. I've tested its compatibility with Nero 6, Easy CD Creator 5 and 6, and Ulead DVD workshop 1.2 (the version currently available for trial download). Easy CD 5 required an update (free from Roxio's site) as it came out before the *06 did, but all 4 programs worked with the *06 without a hitch, so if you currently own any of those programs, you should have no need to upgrade your software to use this drive. Incidentally, when I've made a burn while heavily CPU intensive programs were also running, I've seen Easy CD's buffer underrun protection feature drop the drive speed all the way down to 1X to avoid making coasters, and it seems to work quite well. Considering how widely used Easy CD is, I'd conclude from that that a large fraction of the likely users of this drive would not need to get new software to support this drive, at least for data DVDs. (Easy CD added Video features in version 6.)
Video DVDs I've authored and burned (with DVD Workshop; I've yet to try out EZCD6's video functions) played in my 4 year old DVD player without problems.
I've also tested it with blank -R media of the BeAll brand (no, I'd never heard of them before either), Accu (made by Lead Data) and with Imation +R media (made by CMC Magnetics), without problems. Lead Data and CMC Magnetics are both major manufacturers in the CDR space, so I consider these early results a good sign for compatibility in DVDR format. I've to date burned only one coaster, and I knew when I did it I really should have rebooted first: A couple of applications had crashed and the system was behaving poorly in general just then. I consider that coaster my own fault and not the burner's or application's.
My Summary: I really like this drive, and can find hardly any fault with it, except for a minor quibble about the status LED. It's worked flawlessly with the 3 brands of media and 4 software apps I've tried, and at $128 for the drive and $1 (typical) for blanks, I consider the drive within reach and the media cheaper per meg than CDR. I recommend the *06 without hesitation to anyone who, like me, feels better knowing their dual format drive will use just about any media you want to put in it.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 128.75
Operating System: Windows
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Epinions.com ID:
dnyberg
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Reviews written: 8
Trusted by: 2 members
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