CD Freaks presents: The Pioneer DVR-116DBK DVD Burner Review

CD Freaks are proud to present.
The Pioneer DVR-116DBK DVD Burner Review.


You can read the review here
Please feel free to comment and discuss the review in this thread.

Thanks for the review Dee.

Thank you Dee.

Nice review Dee, thanks. I'm a bit curious about the LED behavior since it's completely different as the other DVR burners... When it's burning it's a constant LED on or now it blinks on and off?

No bitsetting support for SL media with stock firmware should be mentioned as a negative point for all Pioneer drives IMHO.

Thank you for the review. Interesting to see that your results are generally more positive than those of a lot of forum members with this drive and the current firmware. I expect even better and more consistent burn quality with future firmwares.

However, I have the predecessor (DVR-215), a truly excellent drive, so I don't really see a reason to purchase thise drive. DVD burning has more or less reached the limit - prices are very low, no new features that are actually useful in everyday use, and Blu Ray to take over the mainstream soon.

Thanks, excellent review and perfect timing, as I've just ordered a 216

Excellent stuff.
Let's hope that this drives full potential is achieved in the near future.
The Optimal Write Speed technology is something to look forward to. Especially for those reference backups.
Just needs tweaking.

Hmm nice review but I am wondering, is it really worth putting the 40x max CD-R write speed as a negative?

It is a DVD writer after all and you only really save 30-40 seconds max between 40x and 48-52x. The Pioneer seemed to have superior write quality compared with the samsung that seemed almost unable to burn without C2 errors on CD-R media.

When Blu Ray is fully fledged, will you put down negative points for slow CD-R and DVD+-R writing speeds if the only support 12-16x max?

Apart from that, nice review I am thinking of getting either this or the 215 but can't really decide.

Hmm, you're correct, It is a minor negative point. I'll keep that in mind for the next review. Basically i just forgot to add it as an negative.

@juancdg
The LED on my drive stays ON when writing, it doesn't flash accept at the OPC points.

@cd pirate
Every other drive (except Pioneer) i have reviewed writes CD-R media at max 48x and have all burned CD-R media with good quality at that speed, except for the Samsung SH-S223F. Although i do agree that the time difference is minimal between 40x and 48x. 40x is still slow by todays standards.

It may be a DVD Re-Writer, but it supports burning CD-R/RW and Pioneer claims that, so it's only fair to judge its CD-R writing performance.

Regarding Blu ray drive reviews. That is a hypothetical question and pretty difficult to answer. If future blu ray drives support faster than 16x writing speed, i would not mark a drive (down) if it only supported 16x writing speed, because that is the rated speed of 16x media. If max speed was 12x i would mark that down though.

I've been lurking this forum for a bit and this one post made me sign up. I ordered this drive yesterday thinking it had everything I needed to backup movies and make them compatible on the largest set of dvd players I could. I didn't notice it said bitsetting was for DL mode only =(

The fact that you mentioned "with stock firmware" gives me hope that I may be able to implement it? Is there such firmware out now? (I'll keep searching the forum too)

Don't panic, there is a way to enable SL bitsetting for Pioneer drives. If this was not the case, I would have never bought one myself.

You need the great little tool called "MediaCodeSpeedEdit" by ala42 (click).

Download the latest firmware for your drive from the offical Pioneer website (e.g. "DVR116D_FW106EU2.zip" for the Pioneer DVR-116D), unpack the .zip file, and unpack the packed .exe (here: "DVR116D_FW106EU2.EXE") file also (e.g. with a tool like WinRAR), and you get two files, in this case named "R116D.exe" and "A0815001.106". Open the latter file in MediaCodeSpeedEdit, and you will get the option to enable (SL) bitsetting, amongst other features like removing the riplock and making the drive RPC1 ("region free").




Check the bitsetting option, and save the file (keep the same filename). Now use the included flashing tool "R116D.exe" to flash your drive with the patched firmware. Reboot, and you are done.

P.S.: Just remember that you will lose your warranty if you use patched firmware. That's the reason why I wanted the lack of SL bitsetting with stock firmware to be mentioned as a negative point in the review.

Thanks! Exactly what I needed =)

In addition to the procedure mentioned by packetloss, it might also be necessary to open the R116D.exe file in MCSE and save it again in order to "allow same to same flashing" (if you're already running 1.06 on your drive).

I just wonder why i have firmware 1.07 on my new 216d and it is not available on pioneer site?

I wanted to know whats improve in firmware 1.07?

That's not unusual for Pioneer. For example, the latest firmware of the predecessor drive DVR-115 / 215 is 1.19, but only 1.18 is available on the Pioneer website(s). It's unfortunate, because so far, there still is no way to dump the firmware your drive came with (to modify it).
My DVR-215 came with the 1.19 firmware, for example, and I had to go back to 1.18 to be able to use SL bitsetting.

As long as there is no way to dump the firmware, and as long as it's not officially available on the Pioneer websites, nobody knows, because you can't switch between the firmwares to have a comparison (you'd need two drives at least), and because you can't load it into MediaCodeSpeedEdit to see if new MIDs / writing speeds are supported.

Hi all, I am rather new here at the forum so I didn't post many posts but have read quite a few threads, now I have a question/problem and I hope someone'll help.

I few days ago I had to retire my 2 year old (Sony DVD RW DQ-G120A, that Sony was the cheapest butner at the time), here're the reasons, and bought a brand new DVR-116DBK.

After some testing and reading the review I am still not sure if everything is OK with my new burner so I thought someone could help me to get out of the confusion here at the forum.

Here are some of the issues that bother me:

- the default burning speed selected by Nero when burning Verbatim DVD-Rs x16 is x6 (although I can select x16), Nero Info Tool reports x20 for the very same media, Speed Measurement was 61); the default selected speed with 2+ year old Sony was always x16 with that very same media, why is that so?

- during the burning process bufer level oscilates from 75% to 100%, with Sony, buffer level was at 100% all the time, both burners have 2 MB cache; is that OK?

- when burning DVD-R at x16, the burner stops (only once) somewhere near the end of the burning process, the motor stops for a few seconds and LED turns off (*); is that ZCLV instead of CLV mode? I think that's not OK :-/

- x16 burning time od the full DVD-R is 6 minutes, a minute longer than with the 2 year old Sony!?

- the read speed for Verbatim DVD-R x16 is 8x according to Nero Info Tool (although it seems to me that verify time is about the same as it was with my old burner (**) )

- (*) r/w LED never goes off, it just dims at about 25% of the maximum, is that OK or is that a malfunction?

(**)
- on my old burner verify process started at x6 and ended at x16, 116DBK starts at about 1x but very quickly 'jumps' to about x6.5 and continues to near x16

My Firmware version is 1.03, I can see that isn't the newest one but still I believe something could be wrong with the hardware.

I have one more question regarding the review (data interpretation) but I don't want to overwhelm this post so I'll ask that another question some time later.

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Last edited by Chupo_cro; 10-10-2008 at 20:40. Reason: Adding new data (Firmware version).

Forget relying on Info from Nero, Infotool etc.

Do some TRTs.

Is Pioneer 116 good

Why don't you read the review - at least the conclusion?

OK, let's say the trasfer rates are OK, but I still don't know if LED should always be ON and if it's OK for the burner to stop for a while during the recording process :-/

Does this drive offer pie/pif scanning?

No.

Thanks for the quick response. Didn't think it offered since those functions failed to work in kprobe and the equiv. nero tool.

Is this common for all pioneer drives or some do, some don't?

Btw, pretty fast rip speed... up to 18X on a pressed dual layer.. very impressive. (still using my old nd3500 drive after all these years).

Few Pioneer drives scanned well [as implemented], so support for them was dropped from CD Speed.

K-Probe is only for drives with MediaTek chipsets [LiteOn, LiteOn-BenQ, Samsung, BTC].

Hey guys. I'm thinking about flashing my 116 drive but I'm kind of new and unsure what advantages I would get out of it. Where can I read more about what patching the latest firmware with MCSE would let me get out of my drive? Also, what does the rpc1 patch do (or where can I read about what that patch does for this drive?)

Thanks!