Verdict: Aside from LightScribe printing, the Philips is a below-average DVD burner
Burning your own optical discs is now a mainstream pastime, but there's still one feature that separates the homemade platter from a professionally produced product - the label. This is where LightScribe comes in, a natty technology that uses the DVD burner's laser to burn an image onto the top surface of a specially coated LightScribe optical disc.
Philips' new DVDR16LSK is a LightScribe drive that burns DVD+Rs at a zippy 16x. Aside from the little LightScribe logo on the front, however, it's a perfectly normal - and dull - optical drive, with pretty average specifications. Only the 16x DVD+R burning is state-of-the-art, as the rest of the speed ratings are very much last year. With just 2.4x dual-layer burning, it's half the speed of the latest 5x models such as the Elite-listed Toshiba SD-R5372-BK. Even its 40x CD writing and reading is behind the 48x found on many burners.
Sometimes hardware can escape its paper specs, but this wasn't the case for the Philips. Like a poor dice roll at the start of a game of Monopoly, it was going nowhere fast. DVD+R burning was the highlight, with the drive taking six minutes and 13 seconds to write our 4.2GB test file set. This was slower than the Toshiba, but faster than the Asus DRW-1608P, so, overall, it keeps pace with other new burners. When it came to burning a massive 8.5GB of files to a dual-layer DVD+R9, the Philips performed as expected for a 2.4x drive, taking 45 minutes to complete the test - more than twice as long as the 5x Toshiba and even further behind the Asus.
Burning to a DVD+RW was 26 seconds slower than the Toshiba - and the latter is an 8x burner that was stuck at the same 4x speed as the Philips because of the lack of high-speed media at the time of testing. DVD-RW re-writing was marginally inferior, taking over a minute longer than the Toshiba. Worst of all, the Philips seemed to have a severe compatibility problem with our Verbatim DVD-R media. Even though it claimed to be writing at the specified 8x, the burn took around three times longer than we expected. We tried a second disc and had the same problem, although when it had finally finished, the resulting discs were readable.
The Philips' CD skills were also a mixed bag. Writing 700MB of files to CD-R took 41 seconds longer than the Toshiba, and CD-ripping two minutes and 27 seconds longer. We've seen worse, but the Philips isn't a drive you'll want to use if you do a lot of audio encoding from CD. However, ripping 4.3GB of movie files from DVD only took five minutes and 11 seconds, just 16 seconds slower than the Toshiba.
Slow it may be, but while other drives will just spit out a disc with data on it and call it finished, the Philips still has LightScribe to offer. This feature is accessed using the 'Print LightScribe Label' option in the front end of the bundled copy of Nero. Here, you can create a label based on a number of templates, or import an image. Printing is in monochrome, so you get better results by preparing your image with good contrast in a photo editing application, but we found even full-colour photos came out well. However, it takes ages - not quite as long as Michelangelo took for the Sistine Chapel roof, but you'll be waiting for about 17 minutes for a full disc graphic to print, which will drastically extend your disc creation times. LightScribe media is also much more expensive than standard blank discs - about 60p for a CD-R and 80p for DVD-R. This means LightScribe is something you're likely to reserve for special occasions.
CONCLUSION
Aside from LightScribe printing, the Philips is a below-average DVD burner. The price might seem high when compared to the OEM Toshiba, but the Philips comes in a full retail box, and is only £15 more than other retail packaged DVD burners. But while it's a novel technology, for most people it's not worth settling for a below-par burner in order to get it.
