First Look: Pioneer DVR-A07 - Reviews - Hardware - Storage

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This story was printed from ZDNet Australia.
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First Look: Pioneer DVR-A07

November 19, 2003
URL: http://www.zdnet.com.au/reviews/hardware/storage/soa/First-Look-Pioneer-DVR-A07/0,139023427,120281179,00.htm

First Take: Pioneer DVR-A07 Pioneer's soon-to-be-released multiformat DVD writer, the DVR-A07, is an internal drive that marries power with versatility.

Not only does the drive supports the four major recordable DVD formats (DVD-R and DVD+R, DVD-RW and DVD+RW), it even comes with a glut of coaster-prevention features designed to enhance and speed-up your DVD burning experience. More importantly, the DVR-A07 is bestowed with a feature currently unsupported by the competition: 8x DVD-R/+R and 4x DVD-RW/+RW burn capability.

New high-speed burners, including those from Sony, Plextor and HP, already support DVD+R burns at 8x. But Pioneer is currently the only manufacturer that has announced an 8x DVD-R and 4x DVD-RW-compliant burner.

An 8x speed is a significant boost in terms of DVD mastering performance. This means that, theoretically, you can pump up to 10MBps of data to the DVR-A07, outstripping the 3MBps rate of older 2x burners by a huge leap. At 8x, it takes less than 10 minutes to master an entire 4.7GB DVD disc--compared to the 15 minutes that the current crop of 4x writers are capable of.

On top of that, the drive writes CD-R (40x), CD-RW (24x), and 4x DVD+RW, and offers a handful of unique features as well: Pioneer's Defect Management System claims to enhance writing reliability and the DVR-A07 sports a Dynamic Resonance Absorber which reduces playback-disruptive vibrations caused by impaired or low quality media. Pioneer has also incorporated what the company calls "Precision Recording Technology", a smart feature designed to improve image quality in DVD discs by automatically adjusting recording conditions to suit different media.

There are tradeoffs for the extra features and performance, however: To achieve full 8x speed, Pioneer recommends that you have at least an 800MHz processor and a relatively speedy hard drive with ample disk space.

If Pioneer follows its track record with the DVR-A06, we can expect to see a healthy range of DVD authoring and editing applications bundled in with the DVD-A07 0-- or at least with the officially imported version, in any case. At this stage, however, local pricing and release dates are not yet available, so the A07 may have to overcome some healthy price competition by the time it finally does become available.