Not the best for your money, but adequate...
Written: Nov 15 '01
|
Product Rating:
|
|
| Ease of Use: |
 |
|
|
Pros: Highly available media, affordable DVD burning, good compatibility
Cons: Eclipsed by HP DVD100i, slow write times, slow CDR speeds
The Bottom Line: A great first try at the consumer DVD burner market. But this drive is nowhere near as good as the HP DVD100i, also in the same price class.
|
|
|
| kweckstrom's Full Review: Pioneer DVR A03 DVD-RW Burner |
I take a lot of digital photos with my Canon EOS-D30 SLR. The images it produces are roughly 3mb each, so they pile up very quickly. Particularly with a new daughter around :)
I went the CDR route for the longest time, but finding a picture on a pile of CD Roms quickly became a lesson in futility. Media costs and REALLY pokey speeds of DVD-RAM drives kept me from using that as a storage medium, especially with conflicting standards and the lack of option of having it be compatible with any old DVD-Rom.
I purchased this drive without knowing about the HP DVD100i. I have since sold the DVR-A03 in favor of the HP drive, so there will be many comparisons between the two.
First, installing the drive is as easy as installing any other atapi-based drive, CD Rom or otherwise. You've got your slave/master jumper, you plug in your cables, and away you go. The drive is recognized by both Windows 2000 and Windows XP. I haven't tested it on anything else. The included software is both good and bad. It comes with 2 major applications, Prassi PrimoDVD and another application called MyDVD.
Prassi PrimoDVD is actually a pretty nice application. It writes both DVD and CDR, and is fairly easy to use. Since the drive itself comes with very little documentation, you'll appreciate that. There's 2 modes of operation; Simple mode, which is a small screen utilizing limited options, and "Full application" mode, which is what I prefer. One thing that seems to be missing from PrimoDVD (but in all fairness is missing from all other DVD-R enabled apps as well) is the ability to make a VideoCD with a DVD-R. I can only assume that VCD's can't be written to anything bigger than a CD, but that sure would be nice. Since it would keep you from having to use:
MyDVD. What a miserable application. With no real documentation, even its simplistic interface makes absolutely no sense to me. As it stands right now, if your primary goal is to make your own movies with a drive like this, you certainly won't want to use this hunk of junk. I won't go into specifics about it, except to say the application is just miserably horrid and will never generate the results you expect.
Drive performance is decent to poor. I'm sure a lot of you are thinking "Ooh! It's a DVD burner! It's a DVD Reader! It's a CD burner! It's a CD/RW drive! It's everything!"... Well, it's the jack of all trades, master of none. Let's start with the most important aspect first. DVD-R and DVD-RW speeds. DVD-R speeds on $8 media (cheapest brand name i've found) is 2x. That's decent. That works out to 2.7MB/sec written, and a completion time of around 30 minutes. From "decent" speed, it's all downhill though.
Then you have DVD-RW on $16 media. 1x write speed, which means an hour. That's painful. CDR write speed is only mediocre at 8x, and a lot of CDR applications can't use any of their special features with it (such as CloneCD, which makes perfect duplicates of software that even uses copy protection schemes like Safedisk).
DVD Read speeds are perfectly acceptable at 4x, which is roughly 5MB/sec. CD Read speeds though? 16x, and it doesn't even seem that fast. If you're an Audio CD Ripper, forget it. This drive is sloooooow. Far too slow to be the single drive in your system.
The one REALLY nice thing about the DVR-A03 is the media availability. The media is pretty much cheap and widely available. While the drive itself doesn't support anything like "Burn-proof", I was never able to make it coaster a disc, DVD or otherwise. Prices for DVD-R discs start at 4 bucks and change (www.meritline.com), and DVD-RW at around 8 bucks. To be honest, that's not bad for 4.7GB, even if those costs were DOUBLED.
So how does it compare to the HP DVD100i? It doesn't. First off, the HP drive is using a competing standard, DVD+RW, which is DIFFERENT than DVD-RW Be careful when buying media! DVD-R/RW media is NOT compatible with DVD+R/RW media! The first thing the HP has going for it is its write speed, 2.4x. While that doesn't seem like leaps and bounds over the pioneer's 2x, you have to consider that the 2.4x rating is on *REWRITABLE* media. 2.4x speed is good for a full rewritable DVD in around 24 minutes. Certainly nothing to sneeze at. The media costs for DVD+RW is a bit more than DVD-RW, weighing in at around 10 bucks and change per disc (www.ecost.com). With the improved write speeds for rewritable discs, and the marginal difference in cost, I feel i'm better off with getting the HP drive and just buying rewritable discs. As of this writing, there is no "write once" medium for DVD+RW drives available, but that really doesn't bother me.
Also, the HP's CDR speeds are better, offering a 12x write, 10x rewrite and 32x read speed, with more-than-decent digital audio extraction speed. That means that the HP DVD100i (also ATAPI) is perfect for use in a PC where drive bays are scarce. It's plenty fast for all applications. Oh, and HP's software is better as well (though some of it still stinks). They include a newer version of MyDVD that's a little friendlier than Pioneer's version, but I still think these DVD movie apps have a LONG way to go. Luckily i'm into DVD writing for photo storage, not for movies. The HP DVD drive also comes with something called "DLA", or "Drive Letter Access", which basically makes the DVD+RW a 4.7gb hard drive, allowing you to copy, move and delete files at will. Oh, and with no space overhead normally associated with packet writing. After you're done putting whatever files you want on the disc, you can then use the "Make Compatible" function with the HP software that makes the DVD readable in any DVD drive/player. Nice.
Pioneer's first reasonably priced DVD writer is definitely a great thing. Too bad they were beat out by HP so quickly.
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 480
Operating System: Windows
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
kweckstrom
|
 - Top 500 |
|
Member: Karl Weckstrom
Location: Little Ferry, NJ
Reviews written: 100
Trusted by: 99 members
About Me:
Voted "Most Likely to be Photographed as a Bigfoot Sighting" by his senior class.
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.