Lite-On LH-20A1P AllWrite DVD-Writer Preview

January 23, 2007

Preview: Lite-On LH-20A1P
Previewed by: Jan70, Dee-27 & H3rB3i
Provided by: Lite-On BV (NL)
Firmware: KL05
Manufactured: November 2006

We at CDFreaks would like to present a preview of one of the latest DVD-ReWriter’s from Lite-On – the Lite-On LH-20A1P. The Lite-On LH-20A1P supports 20x DVD±R, 8x/6x DVD+RW/DVD-RW, 12x DVD-RAM and 8x DVD+R DL/DVD-R DL writing technology, allowing Double/Dual Layer discs of 8.5Gb to be written.

Company Information:

Let us take a look at some of the company information found at the Lite-On (Europe) Website:

Lite-On IT Corporation is part of the Taiwanese Lite-On Group, which consists of nine consolidated companies. Lite-On Group is a world leading company in digital convergence (3C: Computer, Communications, and Consumer electronics) employing 35,000 people worldwide. Lite-On Group has 45 factories, 29 branch offices, and 4 R&D centers worldwide and generated total revenue of 6 Billion USD in 2004.

The roots of Lite-On IT lie in Taipei, Taiwan, where Lite-On Electronics Inc. was founded in 1975. Back then the core business consisted of production of clock-display LEDs. Because LED (Light Emitting Diode) formed the mainstay of Lite-On in the early years, the English word "Light" inspired the corporate name.

In the twenty years that followed, Lite-On gradually expanded its business throughout the Asian Pacific region to become a respected Taiwanese manufacturer with various established subsidiaries that form Lite-On Group today.

Company Profile
Lite-On IT started of as a business unit within Lite-On Technology Corporation in 1995. By that time the market for Optical Disc Drives (ODD) was growing very fast, and to be able to play a significant role in this, Lite-On Technology decided to establish a dedicated business unit to produce high quality CD-ROM drives. A large manufacturing facility was established in China to meet all demands and Lite-On soon became Taiwan’s biggest CD-ROM drive manufacturer, and number three worldwide.

Due to the growing success in the ODD market, Lite-On IT transformed from a relatively small business unit to an independent subsidiary of Lite-On Group, producing over 1 million drives per month. In 1999, the foundation of Lite-On IT Corporation as the youngest member of the Lite-On Group was a fact. Besides headquarters in Taipei, branch offices were established in the United States (California) and Europe (The Netherlands).

In the years to follow, Lite-On IT continued its growth in the ODD business, by setting extensive distribution networks in Europe and the United States. With the introduction of more ODD products, like CD-RW, DVD-ROM, COMBO and DVD-RW drives, Lite-On IT increased it’s production from 1 million drives per month in 1999, to no less then 5 million drives per month in 2005. With this unique achievement Lite-On IT became the world’s second biggest ODD manufacturer.

Recognizing the convergence between computers and digital consumer electronics, Lite-On IT is now expanding its business making full use of its knowledge and core-technology in the ODD industry. In 2003 Lite-On introduced its first DVD recorder. With this product, the company made a successful entry in the consumer electronics market. Nowadays, Lite-On IT is not only aiming to provide high quality and high performance IT products, but also high-tech digital audio-video appliances. With more digital consumer products to follow in the future, Lite-On IT is resolute to become a worldwide supplier of digital solutions that promise to illuminate everyone’s life.

Historic Timeline Lite-On IT Corporation

1995                 Founded as a business unit in Lite-On Technology Corporation
1997                 Opening of production facility in China
1998                 No. 1 CD-ROM Manufacturer in Taiwan & No.4 Worldwide
                        Opening of branch offices in USA and Europe
1999                 Production capacity over 1 Million per Month
                        Spin-off from Lite-On Technology Corporation as
                        Lite-On IT Corporation
                        No. 3 CD-ROM Manufacturer Worldwide
2001                 Lite-On IT becomes a public listed company
                        Production capacity over 2 Million per Month
2002                 Production Capacity over 3 Million per Month
                        Slim type Combo starts production
                        Foundation of business unit “Digital Consumer"
2003                 Production Base moves from SJP to GZP (Science Park)
                        Production capacity over 4 Million per Month
                        DVD-Rewriter starts production
                        Launch of first Lite-On DVD Recorder
2005                 Production capacity over 5 Million pieces per Month
2006                 Opening of regional office in Germany
                        Lite-On IT becomes No. 2 ODD Manufacturer Worldwide

Management Philosophy

Vision
Lite-On leads the way in 3C convergence, bringing computers, communications, and consumer electronics together to expand the reach and value of technology, to foster new opportunities, and to ensure continued business success.

Our vision is maintained by the core values of our management philosophy:

Quality
High quality standards are the core of every activity and lead to customer loyalty and satisfaction.

Integrity
Integrity fosters trust. We place great value on creating technologies that incorporate the human touch.

Innovation
We honor the spirit of innovation while striving to be creative and responsive to customer needs. This in turn helps strengthen our competitive advantage in the global marketplace.

For more information about the core values of Lite-On Group, please refer to the corporate website: http://www.liteon.com/

Drive Specifications:

What’s inside the box?

In this section we will take a look at what the drive came shipped with and take a look at the drive and its technology.

Front

Back

Left Side

Right Side

Top

Bottom

Below you will see the contents of the retail box:

The internal drive itself
Silver Bezel
Black Bezel
Emergency eject tool
Mounting screws
Audio Cable
Nero OEM Suite software CD
Quick installation and front panel replacement guides in several languages

Now it’s time to take a look at the drive itself:

Beige Bezel

Black Bezel

Silver Bezel

The drive came with three really stylish bezels in a simple and clean design that includes a few logos, a single green coloured LED (we prefer different LED colours to distinguish between reading and writing operations), an emergency eject hole and an eject button. The logos located on the tray include a DVD Forum DVD-Multi Recorder logo, a DVD Alliance DVD+R DL logo, and a CD-RW Ultra Speed logo.

Top

Side

On the underside, we found two sticker and we can read it was made in China – November 2006.

On the back of the drive there are from the left: undocumented pins, digital Audio connector; analogue audio connector; pins and jumper to set the drive to cable select, slave or master; IDE connector and finally the power connector.

Now, let us install the drive and check out the features on the next page…

Test machine:

For this preview we will be using a computer with the following configuration:

Hardware:

Motherboard: Asus A8V Deluxe
Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ (Toledo)
RAM: 1 GB Corsair Kit PC3200 DDR
GFX: MSI GeForce 6600 GT
Sound: Onboard Realtek AC'97
Hard disk: Maxtor 6V300F0 300 GB (S-ATA)

System set-up:

The Lite-On LH-20A1P was connected as Primary Master and identified itself as LITE-ON DVDRW LH-20A1P. DMA (Direct Memory Access) and autorun was enabled for all devices.

And another screenshot from Nero InfoTool below:

From the screenshot from Nero InfoTool above, we can see the Lite-On LH-20A1P does not support CD+G and Mount Rainer. The drive came shipped with firmware version KL05.

Installed Software:

Windows XP Professional XP Professional is installed on the computer along with Service Pack 2 for Windows XP. We will be using the following software in this review:

Features and techniques:

The Internals:

The internals

The drive uses the MediaTek MT1898E chipset.

SMART-BURN:
(Smart Monitoring & Adapting Recording Technology for BURNing)

SMART-BURN is the abbreviation of “Smart Monitoring & Adapting Recording Technology for BURNing", innovated CD-RW technology by LITE-ON IT, will be introduced to other products in the future.
Users always want to successfully burn a disc with a higher speed in CD-RW drive. You may know, there are so many brands of CD-R / CD-RW media in the market with irregular quality & still being cost down in the price war.
If your CD-R / CD-RW media quality is really poor enough or working environment is too hot to induce the Laser Power over margin, the CD-RW drive detected, the burning speed will be forced to decrease to get more reliable Laser working power to secure the life of CD-RW drive & burning quality strategy parameters plus the outstanding running Optimum Power Calibration (OPC) function to provide you the best burning quality.
The buffer under run error is also no longer happened to your drive anymore, SMART-BURN also can allow drive to be suspended during writing, than continue to burn from last point when enough data get in the buffer.
SMART-BURN features :
- Buffer Under Run Error Free
- Running Optimum Power Calibration
- Automatic Writing Strategy & Burning Parameters
- Automatically decrease burning speed when Laser power over margin due to poor media quality or high temperature

SMART-X:
(Smart Monitoring & Adjusting Read-speed Technology for eXtraction)

SMART-X is the abbreviation of Smart Monitoring & Adjusting Read-speed Technology for eXtraction, which is LITE-ON innovated technology after being verified & improved for a long period before get into mass production.
People ask "What’s the DAE speed?" , "What’s VCD play speed of the drive?"…etc. People want to know this to choose party drive. As you know, removable optical media is so open & unable to control the media quality. Drive need to burn a disc with higher speed & quality as possible. So the drive needs to be very smart!
It’s more difficult for drive to rip the Audio & VCD disc than a data disc due to there are only 2 levels error correction for Audio & VCD disc but data disc got 3. For limited un-recoverable error data can be fixed by estimation & calculation due to it’s only for music & movie application. These tolerance ripped data are acceptable & can not be detected by human eyes & ears during playback because there is no pop-noise, interrupt or mosaic on the screen. Of course zero error is preferable for zero tolerance.
SMART-X technology is the drive will rip the music / VCD data as fast as possible with less error, even on a poor quality media ( like dirty, scratched ) , the drive will estimate if the ripped data will result audio noise, interrupt or mosaic on screen, the rip speed can be reduced to get more correctable data. SMART-X provide you as fast rip speed as possible, on the other, if you just want to listen music or watch movie directly, it’s not necessary for the drive to keep high speed to read data. It will work under lower speed automatically to get better playability & lower acoustic, so smart!

ABS - Auto Balancer Spindle:

Steel balls as balancer within spindle motor will be settled into right positions during spin up period ( that’s the reason why a little noise during drive spin up to read a disc ) to compensate imbalance of the disc when rotating at very high speed.
The ABS mechanism can fit from CD-ROM 32x design up to 56x or higher speed that the spindle motor can even works over 10000 rpm with very small vibration generate

Once again back to Smart-Burn. In the latest Official version of this tool we can also find two very interesting and important new functions. These new functions are called OverSpeed (OS) and HyperTuning (HT).

OverSpeed (OS):

OS can let you burn a disc one level above its rated speed.

Smart-Write™ - HyperTuning (HT):

HyperTuning is a so called “Smart-Write™” technology for DVD+/-R and DVD+/-R DL media. Its technology enables the drive to learn a write strategy for unsupported media or for media where you are not satisfied with the quality of the burn when the regular strategy was used. Further, it can give you better results when you use lower quality media with a stronger variation of the disc quality itself.

BookType (Bitsetting):

The Lite-On LH-20A1P supports Bitsetting, and will as default write DVD+R DL media with DVD-ROM BookType. The Bitsetting can be changed in i.e. Nero CD/DVD Speed:

Here is how you can check if your discs are really written with the DVD-ROM BookType:

Start Nero CD-DVD Speed and click the Disc info tab and you should get something like this:

DVD+R media with DVD-ROM BookType

DVD+RW media with DVD-ROM BookType

DVD+R DL media with DVD-ROM BookType

Another quick test is to start Nero CD-Speed and look at the disc information:

This should say DVD-ROM

Quality Scans:

The Lite-On LH-20A1P can be used to measure/scan burned discs for their quality via Nero CD-DVD Speed or KProbe. This can be handy to check and get an impression of which state/condition the burned discs are in.

Quality Scan at 4x

Writing Technology:

20x DVD±R writing speed:

The Lite-On LH-20A1P uses CAV (Constant Angular Velocity) to write DVD+R at 20x. The average speed is 14.68x and total writing time is 4:58 minutes.

The Lite-On LH-20A1P uses CAV (Constant Angular Velocity) to write DVD-R at 20x. The average speed is 14.73x and total writing time is 5:02 minutes.

8x DVD+RW writing speed:

The Lite-On LH-20A1P uses Z-CLV (Zoned Constant Linear Velocity) to write DVD+RW at 8x. The average speed is 7.26x and the total writing time is 8:02 minutes.

6x DVD-RW writing speed:

The Lite-On LH-20A1P uses Z-CLV (Zoned Constant Linear Velocity) to write DVD-RW at 6x. The average speed is 5.77x and the total writing time is 10:39 minutes.

8x DVD+R DL writing speed:

The Lite-On LH-20A1P uses Z-CLV (Zoned Constant Linear Velocity) to write DVD+R DL at 8x. The average speed is 6.82x and the total writing time is 17:49 minutes.

8x DVD-R DL writing speed:

The Lite-On LH-20A1P uses Z-CLV (Zoned Constant Linear Velocity) to write DVD+R DL at 8x. The average speed is 6.83x and the total writing time is 18:15 minutes.

12x DVD-RAM:

The Lite-On LH-20A1P uses P-CAV (Partial-Constant Angular Velocity) to write DVD-RAM media at its maximum speed of 12x (verify off). This resulted in an average write speed of 10.05x and a total write time of 5 minutes and 49 seconds.

On the next page: Reading performance…

Reading performance:

For these tests we will use Nero CD-DVD Speed to read various CD and DVD’s, including audio discs and DVD-media.

Pressed discs:

For this test we used a pressed CD-ROM disc containing Creative Blaster Audigy install CD that is close to 74 minutes long. Below you will see the produced result:

CD-Recordable Discs:

For this test, we made a copy of the original Creative Blaster Audigy install CD. The disc we used was a Verbatim 48X certified CD-R disc manufactured by Mitsubishi Chemicals Corporation.

CD-Rewritable discs:

Again, we made a copy of the original Creative Blaster Audigy install CD; this time we used a Verbatim Ultra Speed+ (32X) CD-RW disc made by Mitsubishi Chemicals Corporation.

The drive is locked around 32x while reading CD-RWs.

Audio CD:

We used Nero CD-DVD Speed to measure the transfer rate. The audio disc we used is slightly larger than the disc used for the other tests, to be exact it’s about 78 minutes long (77:43:45).

100 minutes CD:

We used Nero CD-DVD Speed to measure the transfer rate. The 100 min disc we used is slightly larger than the disc used for the other tests, to be exact it is 99 minutes and 57 seconds long.

DVD reading performance:

Again, we will use Nero CD-DVD Speed to measure the reading performance, this time for various types of DVD discs. The drive should read pressed single layer DVD-discs at 16X.

DVD – DVD-Video:

For our DVD reading performance tests we are going to start with a single and dual layered DVD video discs. While only 1X speed is required to watch DVD movies, it’s useful to be able to read the discs at higher speeds if you’re going to extract (rip) the content of the disc to your hard drive.

DVD-Video Single Layer

DVD-Video Double Layer (OTP)

DVD-Video Double Layer (PTP)

As we can see, it reads DVD-Video Single layer at 16x and DVD-Video Double layer at 12x.

DVD – DVD+R/RW:

For this test, we used one DVD+R and one DVD+RW with about 4.4Gb of data. Below are the results:

DVD+R:

DVD+RW:

DVD – DVD-R/RW:

For this test, we used one DVD-R disc and one DVD-RW disc filled with about 4.4Gb of data. Our test results are found below:

DVD-R:

DVD-RW:

DVD – DVD+R DL:

For this test, we used one DVD+R DL disc and the result can be found below:

DVD – DVD-R DL:

For this test, we used one DVD-R DL disc and the result can be found below:

DVD – DVD-RAM:

For this test, we used a Maxell DVD-RAM 12x disc and the result can be found below:

On the next page: Writing performance…

Writing Data CD-R/RW discs:

The specifications state that the drive should be able to write CD-R’s at 48x and CD-RW’s at 32x.

CD-R:

The Lite-On LH-20A1P uses CAV (Constant Angular Velocity) to write CD-R’s at 48x. This gives an average writing speed of 37.14x and a writing time of 2 minutes and 38 seconds.

CD-RW:

The Lite-On LH-20A1P uses Z-CLV, (Zone-Constant Linear Velocity) to write CD-RWs at 32x. The average speed is 25.01x and total writing time is 3 minutes and 57 seconds.

In this preview, we did not include any quality scans of the CD-R/RW discs.

DVD-Writing performance:

The specifications of this drive tell us that it should write DVD±R at 20x, DVD+RW/-RW at 8x/6x, and DVD±R DL at 8x. In these tests we will be using a Lite-On LH-20A1P with firmware KL05 along with KProbe to measure the disc quality. We will also be using the Optiarc AD-7173A/Lite-On LH-20A1P with firmware 1-01/KL05 along with CD-Speed for our read-back tests.

EDITORS NOTE: Some DVD±R media was burned by using the OverSpeed function.