LITE-ON SHM-165H6S Internal DVD Writer

Introduction

The first salvos in the ongoing battle between the two next-generation formats aiming to succeed the incumbent DVD standard have been fired by two Japanese manufacturers. Earlier this week, Fujitsu became the first vendor to announce the availability of Blu-ray compatible PCs and that it will ship a desktop and a notebook equipped with Blu-ray drives in Japan by June. This followed hot on the heels of news that Toshiba plans to equip HD-DVD players in its notebooks by May.

With both camps seemingly set for a battle royale in the marketplace, most shrewd consumers will probably be sitting on the fence until the dust has settled from the clash. Early adopters as usual will place their bets on either formats or even both; it all depends on the applications, movies or games that will be released for the new formats. For the general public who are clueless about all this, don't fret as the DVD has more than a few years in the market, going by how the much older CD-ROM is still comfortably coasting along.

Therefore, if you are one of those who have been putting off the purchase of a DVD writer because it wasn't fast or cheap enough, now is probably the best time to buy. In fact, it is a sunset industry. There won't be any significant technological refinements to it as companies are increasingly diverting their resources to the new formats, which have greater profit margins. Prices are also probably at an all-time low as manufacturing processes and yields have been tuned to maximum efficiency.

Hence it is perhaps fitting that today we have a new DVD writer from LITE-ON, one that encompasses all the advancements made in this sector, from its LightScribe capability to its versatility and speed in reading and writing all kinds of available media now. In short, the 'pinnacle' of DVD writer technology before its inevitable decline. Here are the technical details behind the LITE-ON SHM-165H6S:

The LITE-ON SHM-165H6S

There's nothing much to remark about the exterior appearance of the LITE-ON SHM-165H6S as the aesthetics of an internal DVD writer is severely limited by its functionality. The front bezel is probably the only bit of real estate available for vendors to inject some flair and here, LITE-ON outdoes most of its competitors by offering two interchangeable faceplates (silver & black). That should be more than good enough for anyone looking to blend his or her drive into the façade of the casing.

In terms of its capabilities, this LITE-ON drive fulfils its "Super AllWrite" tag by supporting all popular forms of media now. So you can expect the usual DVD+/-R (and its dual layer form), DVD+/-RW, along with the less common DVD-RAM and of course, all your CD standards. The writing speeds for the media are the fastest possible now and with DVD writing technology not likely to progress further, possibly the peak speeds attainable.

Additionally, the LightScribe function is a very useful tool for those intending to produce their own DVDs in a 'semi-professional' manner as it allows labels to be inscribed onto the media's surface. LITE-ON is not the pioneer of this technology but the SHM-165H6S is one of its first burners to feature it.

DVD-ROM Benchmark

Here, we go through some figures to better understand the read capabilities of the LITE-ON drive using Nero DVD Speed. This is tested with two commercially pressed DVD-ROMs (a single-layer and a dual-layer) and four recordable DVD media (DVD-R. DVD-RW, DVD+R and DVD+RW).

Compared to other drives, the LITE-ON is not the fastest when it comes to read speed. It is competent enough such that it managed 12x speed on average for a few occasions though its peak speed at the end rarely hit the stated 16x. On the bright side, CPU usage was accordingly low and 3% utilization was the highest it hit. Meanwhile, seek times were also typical of DVD writers of its caliber and not particularly outstanding.

DVD Decrypting and Digital Audio Extraction

A free and popular utility used by many to decrypt original DVDs and hence backup the contents to a computer's hard drive, DVD Decrypter has unfortunately succumbed to the pressure of a certain company whose technology it was circumventing and has since ceased development. There will not be a new version but the most recent v3.5.4.0 remains in the wilds of the Internet if you should need such a program. While there are other commercial solutions, it is still one of the best and of course, free.

It was rather slow when it came to decrypting the DVD-ROM that we tested. Compared to the Sony DRU-810 that we tested previously, it was almost 5 minutes off the mark.

The LITE-ON managed to hits its stated maximum CD-ROM read speed of 48x and its average read speed was a very decent 35x.

Additional Information

Burning Benchmark

In this segment, we will be testing the write speed of the LITE-ON SHM-165H6S for the various DVD recordable media below. This is a gauge of how this drive stacks up against the competition.

4x DVD±RW / DVD+R DL

Brands of Media used: -

• SmartBuy 4x DVD+RW = PRODISCW02
• Verbatim 4x DVD-RW = MCC01RW4X
• Verbatim 2.4x DVD+R DL = MKM001

As you may have noticed, the LITE-ON is not a speed demon and actually falls behind for DVD+R DL burns. Its burning performance for both rewritable media was also rather mediocre.

6x DVD-RW / 8x DVD+RW

Brands of Media used: -

• Ricoh 8x DVD+RW = RICOHJPNW21
• MKM 6x DVD-RW = MKM 01RW6X01

Again, the performance of the LITE-ON is rather average and when compared to the Sony DRU-810A tested earlier, it is a tad slower.

Additional Burns

Despite all the research that goes into making DVD media, it still retains an element of unpredictability, thanks to the various 'dyes' used to manufacture the media that differs from one vendor to another. Throw in the many branded media that actually repackages media from OEMs and it could be quite a messy situation.

Hence, as part of our tests, we put the DVD writer through its paces by testing its compatibility with a range of media, varying in brands and speeds. This will hopefully tell us which media is best for a particular drive and reduce the odds of getting coasters. However, it would be near impossible for anyone to test a truly comprehensive list of media so we have tried to include only the more common brands found off the shelves. If you would like to see the results of a specific brand of media, kindly feedback to us the manufacturer ID of the media and we will try to include that in the next review.

Also, over-specification writing is something that many enthusiasts are interested in. This is the ability to write the media beyond its nominal speed. Not all drives allow this and those that do may be picky about the brand and type of media. Hopefully the LITE-ON SHM-165H6S is capable of doing this.

16x DVD±R

Brands of Media used:-

• Prodisc 16x DVD-R = PRODISCF02
• Sony 16x DVD-R = SONY16D1
• TDK 16x DVD-R = TTH02
• PHILIPS 16x DVD+R = PHILIPSC16
• Sony 16x DVD+R = SONYD21
• TDK 16X DVD+R = TDK-003

The LITE-ON failed to write the Philips 16x DVD-R at its rated speed of 16x. Instead, it burned the disc at 8x, though at a decent timing for 8x. This was not the case for the TDK 16x DVD+R, which despite the 16x burning speed requested, the final result was a woeful 11 minutes wait.

8x DVD±R and More 4x DVD±RW

Brands of Media used:-

• Ritek 8x DVD-R = RITEKG05
• TDK 8x DVD-R = TTG02
• Fujifilm 8x DVD-R = TYG02
• Fujifilm 8x DVD+R = YUDEN000,T02
• LG 8x DVD+R = PRODISCR03
• MKM 8x DVD+RW = MKMA03
• Maxell 6x DVD-RW = JVC1VICTORD7
• Smartbuy 4x DVD+RW = PRODISCW02
• Verbatim 4x DVD+RW = MKMA02

Unfortunately, over-specification was not enabled in all our media tests as we did not manage to do so for any of the brands of media used above. This is not a failing of course as the media and writer performed to its specifications. Going by the timings we noticed, we were glad to report that the LITE-ON drive performed to expectations for all the media.

**Updated on 18th April 2006**

LITE-ON does provide a workaround to the drive's default lack of over-specification writing via their own unadvertised bundled Smart-Burn utility. For those who would like to experiment and extract more out of their drive, you can enable the OverSpeed function within the utility.

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).

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.

Conclusion

One of the surprising developments in the optical drive industry was the recent announcement by BenQ that its optical drive production unit has been acquired by LITE-ON in a strategic deal. This merger between the third and fourth largest players in the market will create a massive entity that will catapult itself instantly into second place. Considering the tight margins and competitive pressures in the industry, this consolidation makes much sense and the new company should hope to benefit from greater economics of scale.

While BenQ has been a relatively new player in the scene, it has quickly captured a sizable share of the market due to its stellar drives, which managed to be both price and feature competitive. If our impressions of the new LITE-ON SHM-165H6S drive hold true, LITE-ON certainly needs some of BenQ's engineering prowess. Not that LITE-ON makes poor drives, it's just that based on what we have seen today, the SHM-165H6S is not particularly outstanding.

It performs up to the mark for most burns, though at mediocre speeds that barely raised our heartbeats. The burn quality was for the most part, pretty decent and that could be one of its strengths. While BenQ drives have been noted for their ability to 'over-speed', that is an unofficial 'feature' missing from the LITE-ON drive, which needs to be manually enabled via their bundled utility. Its main advantage probably lies in its 'jack of all trades' card of supporting all the media formats and to top it off, it has LightScribe technology. Crucially, all these features do not make it unique but just another player in a crowded market with more add-ons to offer.

Finally, as a new drive with all the spanking tech acronyms, the LITE-ON SHM-165H6S is definitely going to cost more than the average 16x burner. Priced from between US$52 – US$60, it is a decent price for what you get. It may be more expensive than the vanilla 16x writers in the market, like BenQ's own DW1640 but the addition of DVD-RAM and LightScribe should satisfy those who need a writer to 'write them all'.

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