Pioneer DVR-106

As well as being the first company to launch EIDE DVD burners into the mainstream IT marketplace, Pioneer is the company behind DVD-R and DVD-RW recordable media formats. In the last couple of years, it has fought hard to stave off competition from Philips' rival standard, DVD+RW, and until recently buying a DVD recorder meant locking yourself into one standard over the other.

The choice of media formats has caused confusion for the unwary consumer, not helped by poor training in some high-street stores in which DVD+R discs are sometimes offered to customers buying DVD-R drives and vice versa. Sony's DRU-500A Multidrive (see issue 100, p105) broke new ground by supporting both standards, and more multistandard devices are appearing in its wake from the likes of NEC, Iomega and TDK with its DVD Writer 212N (see issue 106, p80). Amazingly, even Pioneer seems tacitly to have admitted that standards wars are a bad thing and has now taken the decision to support both formats with its latest drive, the DVR-106.

As with most other DVD and CD writers, the 106 connects to the system via EIDE channels and is recognised immediately with no need to install proprietary drivers or software. Burning tests were performed using Roxio's Easy CD & DVD Creator 6, using a selection of +RW, +R, -RW and -R discs provided by Big Pockets.

Burning 3.5GB of data to a 4x DVD-R disc took a little under 12 minutes, while the same files took 23 minutes to burn to previous-generation DVD-R and new 2x DVD-RW discs, and about 18 minutes to record to DVD+R and DVD+RW media. This equates to around 3.3MB/sec, despite the drive having a claimed 4x writing speed for DVD+R. CD burning speeds are behind the times when compared with the fastest CD-R drives, but the DVR-106 is still no slouch, recording 600MB of data to CD-R in four and a half minutes and to CD-RW in just over seven minutes. Read speeds were reasonable, with 2GB of data copying back from a DVD-R disc in seven minutes. We found that 600MB of data copied from CD-R in just under three minutes.

The DVR-106 behaves well and does a good job. Its performance was stable and it happily accepted a wide range of recordable media - some burners can still be fairly picky about the discs they'll record to. Newcomers to DVD-Video may find it worthwhile to buy the full retail pack: the boxed version is called the DVR-A06 and comes with a generous software selection from Pinnacle. This includes a light version of Studio 8 for video editing, Expression for simple DVD-Video authoring and InstantCopy 7 SE for disc backup. But the bare drive is a far better bet for experienced users who have their own data-burning and video software, and consequently have no need for extra entry-level applications.

Pioneer's support for DVD+ discs as well as its own format is a wise move, particularly in the OEM market where the +RW camp has become extremely aggressive: with any luck dual-format support will soon become ubiquitous and the problem will disappear.

The DVR-106 will soon have stiff competition, given that Sony has a new drive on the way, but until then the good performance and remarkably low price of the Pioneer mean it knocks TDK off the top spot and takes its place on our A List.

Author: Peter Wells