Verdict: The best lightscribe DVD burner yet
Samsung's latest forays into the world of storage have been rather good. The SpinPoint P120S hard disk resided in prime position on our Elite list for a good few months, and it's still a great choice. With the WriteMaster SH-W162 DVD burner, Samsung is relatively early in offering 8x dual-layer burning, just one month behind Pioneer's 8x dual-layer burner, the DVR-110DBK.
The WriteMaster comes in two flavours, the SH-W162C/D and the SH-W162L. The latter supports LightScribe, so it can use the laser to burn text and graphic labels to compatible discs. Otherwise, their specifications are identical.
The 8x dual-layer burning only extends to the DVD+R9 format. The newer DVD-R9 standard is despatched at just 4x, unlike the Pioneer. Still, as we weren't able to find any blank discs certified above 4x in either format, it isn't a point we want to spend many hours debating.
We looked at the retail kit LightScribe model (SH-W162L/RSBN). This comes with two LightScribe discs (one CD, one DVD), and the package includes the ubiquitous Nero 6 OEM suite, which is a great collection of software if you don't have any DVD burning utilities.
Not included, but only a download away ( )www.samsungodd.com, is Magic Speed, a drive speed control utility. By default, all of Samsung's drives run discs at reduced rotational speed for lower noise levels. Magic Speed lets you select High Speed mode, but it only applies to reading CDs, and has no effect on DVD reading, or any recording speeds.
Despite its healthy specifications, the WriteMaster's performance was a mixed bag. With write-once DVD media, it sailed through our tests. It was close to 35 per cent faster than the Pioneer with DVD+R media, and over 30 per cent faster with DVD-R, completing the former in five minutes and 30 seconds, and the latter in just 17 seconds more. Part of this difference was because the Samsung was able to burn at our DataWrite media's full 16x rating. The 16x speed remains problematic, with many drives supporting it only with a limited set of accredited media. Some allow over-speed writing, achieving 12x or even 16x writing with only 8x-rated discs, but this is dependent on compatibility between specific drive and media brands.
The paucity of high-speed discs always dampens our ardour for the latest optical drives, and we encountered this problem in a number of areas while testing the Samsung.
The specs state that it can write to DVD+RW at 8x and DVD-RW at 6x, but we couldn't locate RW media above 4x in either standard. The Samsung took 14 minutes and one second to burn to DVD-RW, and another 17 seconds before the DVD+RW was complete, putting it behind the Pioneer.
Similarly, although the Samsung claims 8x performance when writing to dual-layer DVD+R, we could only lay our hands on 4x media. The WriteMaster claimed to write at full speed, but its performance results were again behind those of last month's Pioneer and Plextor drives - this time by a considerable margin. The Samsung took 49 per cent longer than the Pioneer.
Still, the Samsung did regain some brownie points when burning to CD-R. Although it would only burn at 40x on our 48x media, despite allegedly supporting the faster speed, it returned a very commendable time of just over three minutes. This was only slightly shy of last month's Plextor, and 30 seconds faster than our Elite-listed Pioneer. A full-disc graphic image took a shade over 16 minutes to print using LightScribe, which is faster than the last LightScibe drive we saw, the Philips DVDR16LSK.
CONCLUSION
At around £48, the retail version of the SH-W162L/RSBN is relatively good value for money. Scan sells the OEM version of Philips' latest LightScribe drive, which has almost identical specifications, for around £35, so you're paying around the going rate for the software Samsung includes in the box.
If you don't want LightScribe then the SH-W162C/BEBN OEM version of the WriteMaster can be had for around £30, slightly less than the price of the Pioneer. The latter remains our Elite choice for optical drive, as the Samsung's dual-layer performance is a worry. However, as LightScribe drives go, this is the best we've seen.
