Introduction
In order to store data on a disc, there are two essential ingredients: the optical drive, and the optical media. Many reviews focus on the optical drive, and how it performs writing a variety of media. We now have the opportunity to focus on the other component, the recordable disc. Playo products, manufactured by the Abcron Corporation have recently introduced their Playo line of discs. They include CDR, DVDR, and DVDRW (plus and minus) varieties. In this review we will focus on the DVD+R and DVD-R discs which are two of the popular discs that users feed their DVD rewritable drives. Other Playo products include flash media cards, flash card readers, and cases.
Methodology
Here at LIVEdigitally we have access to three of the current crop of DVD rewritable drives: the LiteOn 1693S, the Plextor 740A, and the Samsung WriteMaster. All are 16x burners that can write to both “plus” and “minus” discs. A good test of the media would be to see how each of the drives can write to it. The write time of each disc will be monitored. Each of the discs will be scanned in Nero’s CD-DVD Speed on my LiteOn 852S drive at 4x, which I’ve used for scanning duties on all my previous optical drive reviews. This will give us an idea of the write quality of the media with the drive. In addition, we will test that the discs play in a Sharp DV-S1U stand alone DVD player.
Continue reading