Plextor 716A Review

DVD READING TESTS Capabilities P1

DVD Read Performance

For our read tests we tried various types of DVD recordable media, which included: DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW, DVD+R, DVD-RAM and a pressed DVD-ROM disk.

DVD-R READING

Firstly we checked its performance with a DVD-R disk using Nero CD Speed (DVD Speed incorporated):

The 716 starts off well but performs badly around the 3.5GB mark and continues at a slow speed. This causes its overall average to drop to 7.73 X speed and it did not finish the test (the disk wasn't particularly scratched or bad either). We ran the test again with firmware 1.03 but the results were identical.

DVD-RW READING

The 716A's reading of DVD-RW was good. Above you can see it averaged 9.05X and managed to peak to 8.15 towards the end of the disk.

DVD-ROM SINGLE LAYER READING

The 716A performs well averaging 11.57 speed but it dropped its speed again towards the end of the disk. It didn't reach its stated read speed of 16 for single layer DVD-ROMs.

DVD+RW READING

It averaged 8.43 X speed and reached 8.11 x towards the end of our Verbatim DVD+RW test disk. You can see the problematic dips towards the end of the disk again again.

DVD+R READING

The 716A managed an average of 8.88 X speed with our "+R" disk using CAV. The problem speed drops can be seen here as well.

DVD+R DUAL LAYER READING

We next tried a Verbatim Double-Layered disk recorded at 4 speed. The 716 copes quite well with Dual Layered disks and reads them at 8 speed using CAV. As you can see above, the average read speed was 6.

DVD-RAM Caddy-less Reading

The 716A can not recognise DVD-RAM disks.

DVD CSS Video Ripping

The Plextor 716A drive has two modes for DVD Ripping: playback & full speed. If the drive is using playback mode then your movies will only rip at 2 X speed.

To enable the drive to rip CSS protected movies at full speed make sure that the drive is empty and the tray is closed. Then press AND hold the drive's eject button until you see the LED flash green (about 5 seconds). When you release the eject button the tray will open - the next disk you place will be ripped at full speed (it will reset back to playback mode when you press the eject button or lose power).

I 23:20:06 DVD Decrypter Version 3.5.1.0 started!
I 23:21:54 Source Device: [1:0:0] PLEXTOR DVDR PX-716A 1.03 (D:) (ATA)
I 23:21:54 Source Media Type: DVD-ROM
I 23:21:54 Source Media Region Code: 2
I 23:21:54 Source Copyright Protection System Type: CSS/CPPM
I 23:21:54 Destination Folder: C:\DVDWriting\isos\Fellowship2\
I 23:21:54 Detect Mastering Errors: No
I 23:21:54 File Splitting: By File
I 23:21:54 Multi Angle Processing: No
I 23:21:54 Remove Macrovision Protection: Yes
I 23:21:54 Stream Processing: No
...
I 23:33:51 Decrypting VTS_03_1.VOB... (LBA: 3936202 - 3936523) - KEY: C0 12 9F BE 96
I 23:33:52 Operation Successfully Completed! - Duration: 00:11:57
I 23:33:52 Average Read Rate: 10,979 KB/s (7.9x) - Maximum Read Rate: 16,298 KB/s (11.8x)

Plextor 716A Average Rip Speed: 7.9 x

The Plextor 716A is very good at ripping DVD movies and peaked at 11.8x. The Plextor 716A scored very high in the ripping test and scored our current best score.

ERROR CORRECTION - SCRATCHED DVD

No one manages to keep CD/DVDs in pristine condition so in this test we compared how the Plextor copes with scratches and unreadable data. Different drives handle scratched / unreadable DVDs differently - some can take hours to read in data, whilst others have inferior error correction abilities and can only read limited data from the disk. Toshiba DVD-ROMs from Japan (not the new Samsung made ones) were regarded as good fast readers.

For this test we used a disk with 3 scratches, ink, finger prints, dust on a Ritek disk. We used Nero CD-DVD speed disk's scan disk function under "surface scan" mode to find out how much was unreadable. The 716A performs fairly well in this test and didn't need to slow down too much however there is room for improvement and we would like to see Plextor and other drive manufacturers offer faster and better error correction of scratched and dirty disks.

Page 5 - Last Updated: 6 January 2005