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LITE-ON SHM-165H6S Internal DVD Writer

By Vincent Chang - 17 Apr 2006

Quality Check

Quality Check

KProbe2 is one of the frequently used applications employed for testing readability of written discs. Written by a former employee of LITE-ON (though not in his official capacity), it works naturally on LITE-ON optical drives and helps to give a numerical value to the burn quality of a DVD. This is expressed through the amount of PI (Parity Inner) and PIF (Parity Inner Fail) errors found on the written disc and there is a certain amount of correlation between these values and the write quality of the drive on the various media that we tested. As a rough gauge of the write quality, the average values for PI and PIF for a readable disc should not be more than 280 and 4 respectively.

While the values returned by KProbe 2 are certainly useful for assessing the readability of a written media and the DVD writer that was used to write the disc(s), we must stress again that the average PI and PIF values should be taken as just an indicator; simply because what worked on one drive might not necessarily work on another (not to mention that disc quality variation may occur as well).

KProbe 2 Scans
Manufacturer / Speed Disc ID PI Average PIF Average
Verbatim 2.4x DVD+R DL MKM-001 11.15 0.10
Verbatim 4x DVD-R DL MLM01RD30 21.87 0.15
TDK 16x DVD-R TTH02 0.94 0.03
Sony 16x DVD-R SONY16D1 7.44 0.05
Prodisc 16x DVD-R PRODISCF02 8.42 0.19
TDK 16x DVD+R TDK003 0.63 0.05
Sony 16x DVD+R SONYD21 2.19 0.04
Philips 16x DVD+R PHILIPS, C16 1.76 0.10
TDK 8x DVD-R TTG02 12.81 0.04
Ritek 8x DVD-R RITEKG05 32.00 0.73
Fujifilm 8x DVD-R TYG02 1.82 0.01
TDK 8x DVD+R RICOHJPNR02 3.59 0.04
Fujifilm 8x DVD+R YUDEN000, T02 0.65 0.01
LG 8x DVD+R PRODISCR03 0.87 0.06
Ricoh 8x DVD+RW RICOHJPNW21 34.59 0.18
Mitsubishi 8x DVD+RW MKMA03 16.70 3.16
Mitsubishi 6x DVD-RW MKM 01RW6X01 28.36 0.07
Maxell 6x DVD-RW JVC1VICTORD7 763.0 23.59
SmartBuy 4x DVD+RW PRODISCW02 68.97 18.76
Verbatim 4x DVD+RW MKMA02 13.04 0.94

From the table, there were two discs which fell outside the recommended 'safe' limits by KProbe 2 for readability. All in all the overall results are quite decent, as almost all the other media had no problems with the drive and with Taiyo Yuden media giving extremely good PIF averages as you may have expected.

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