Review of the Philips DVDRW208K

As one of the companies proposing DVD+RW, Philips released their first DVD rewriter for use in personal computers in November 2001. labDV was one of the first to get a hold of this drive and performed several tests. In this article, our testresults are published. Of course, because the drive is very new, our experience has it's limitations. So if you have any experience that you want to share with us, please send me an email. We will keep this article up to date while my experience grows.

Bundle contents
Specifications
Installation
The drive
MyDVD
Nero
Compatibility

1. Bundle contents

The Philips drive is shipped in a box containing the following:

the drive with 4 screws to install it in the computer
a cable to connect the drive to the sound card
a small installation manual
an installation CD-ROM with the drivers
a CD-ROM with Nero Burning ROM vs. 5.5
a CD-ROM with PowerDVD vs.3.0
a CD-ROM with MyDVD vs.3.0
a blank DVD+RW disc
a blank CD-R disc

The manual is very basic, but sufficient to install the drive. Missing in the bundle is a cable to connect the drive to Power (DC), so you should not forget to buy one if you don´t have one or if you don´t remove another drive from your computer. The presence of a blank DVD+RW disc is nice, because you can immediately start to see if the DVD+RW drive works properly.

2. Specifications

According to the information supplied with the drive, the following specifications apply.

Minimum system requirements as specified on the box are Pentium III, 500MHz processor, 300MB hard drive space and 128 MB RAM. Because I wanted to install the drive on a PC with a Pentium II, 400MHz and 512 MB RAM, I contacted Philips to ask them if it would work. They could not give me a guarantee but it would depend on other hardware in the system like the video card etc. Anyway, I installed it on my Pentium II system and it works fine. For Direct-to-DVD recording (see below) minimum requirement is a Pentium III 800MHz, but that also seems to work fine on my Pentium II, 400MHz.

3. Installation

The size of the drive is the same as standard CD-drives so it fits without any problems in the 5 3/4" rack. I had to remove the DVD-ROM drive that was installed on my computer because the DVD+RW needs to be connected to the sound card. I don´t know if I there are soundcards that have room for two DVD-drives or if they can be connected in parallel. Installing the drivers is easy. Just put the installations disc in the drive and it will autorun and install the necessary software on the computer.

The other software packages, Nero for data burning, PowerDVD for playing Video-DVD, and MyDVD for Video-DVD authoring and burning have to be installed separately through the supplied CD-ROM´s. If you already have other software packages installed on your PC for the purposes as mentioned, you can choose to keep using them and not install te bundled software packages. Personally, I had an older version of WinDVD and Nero 5.0 on my system and I took the opportunity to replace them by PowerDVD and Nero 5.5. If you do that, it is usualy a good idea to remove your older software as it may lead to conflicts on your system.

4. The drive

Nice feature of the drive is that it has several lights on it's front panel which show what kind of disc is in it and if it is reading or writing. On the right hand side there is a blue LED that illuminates when there is a DVD in the drive. When there is a CD in the drive a blue LED on the left hand illuminates. In the middle, between the two LED's, there is a line that illuminates blue when the drive is reading and red when the drive is writing. I think it is a nice feature because writing a DVD-Video can take quite some time and through the lights you can see if the drive is working.

I tested the drive reading CD-ROM, CD-R, CD-RW, DVD and DVD+RW and did find no problems. Also writing to the different types of media worked good. On one occasion I noted a problem: when I burned a data CD-R with Nero and had it automatically eject after burning and then pushed the tray back in, the right hand side LED illuminated suggesting that it recognized it as a DVD and the drive could not read the data on the CD-R. After I ejected and closed the tray again the drive recognized the disc correctly and could read the data without any problems. At later trials I could not reproduce the error. I have reported the issue to Philips, but have not yet received a response.

5.MyDVD

For DVD-Video authoring the drive is bundled with MyDVD. This program developed by Sonic can perform the followings processes:

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