Sony DDU220E-06 DVD-ROM Drive
Reviewed by Tachyon (7 September 99)

At first look, the drive looked like any other regular CD ROM drives that you see in the market today. Upon closer inspection, you will see the DVD logo embossed into the tray of the drive. There isn't anything spectacular about the looks of the drive and it has all the usual headphone jack and volume control on the front panel. At the rear of the drive, you can see all the regular connectors. The drive has a SPDIF output for digital audio. The product we received was a retail version and comes with the InterVideo WinDVD software. Setting up was a breeze. It only took me less than 20 minutes to get everything up and running. Most of the time spent was waiting for Windows to boot up and the software to get installed.

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The Tests

From the tests that we run, the drive performed surprisingly well compared to most other CD ROM drives. The touted maximum CD ROM speed is 32X while for DVD ROM is 6X. The following results were obtained when we ran WinBench CD on it.

Test System Configuration
Processor	Celeron 366 on MSI-6905 riser card
RAM	128MB PC100 Hyundai SDRAM
Motherboard	Intel BX Chipset with Slot-1
Hard Drive	Quantum Fireball 6.4 GB
Operating System	Windows 98 Second Edition Build 4.10.2222A
Software Used	CD WinBench

CD WinBench 99 Results
WinMark 99 Overall (Kbytes/sec)	1310
Access Time (milliseconds)	89.3
CPU Utilization (percent used)	3.32
Transfer Rate:Inner disc (Kbytes/sec)	2180
Transfer Rate:Outer disc (Kbytes/sec)	4380

As you can see from the results, the numbers are pretty close to those claimed by Sony in the specification.

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Welcome To DVD

The thought of being able to play DVD movies on my PC really excited me. It meant that I could watch any movie anytime I want and at the comfort of my very own PC. I was able to quickly setup my PC with the WinDVD software with ease. It was just a matter of popping in a DVD title into the drive and WinDVD autoran the moment the drive detected the DVD (an indicator on the drive lights up when it detects a DVD). WinDVD default settings played the disc automatically. The region code was also set to region 1 by default. The region setting is resettable after which it sticks to the last setting after a certain number of times it was launched. This was perfectly OK with me and it didn't bothered me not being able to play discs from any other region than region 1 since the best titles are from region 1. The title which I tested the unit on was Goldeneye. The startup sequence appeared just like it did on my DVD player. It allowed me to select the version to watch (Pan & Scan or Widescreen) and the audio quality preferred (Dolby Digital 5.1 or Dolby Surround). The video was smooth and flicker free and did not suffer from pauses or glitches as evidence of errors from the drive. WinDVD also allows the user to view the video in full screen (the default is a window). The sound was only in stereo as I did not have a 5.1 speaker system setup tp take advantage of the Dolby Digital sound. The audio quality was good since I connected the drive audio output to the sound card using the SPDIF output (the drive also has analog outputs). It is really only as good as the sound card can be at reproducing the digital audio data (I use a SoundBlaster Live! in this case). The controls on WinDVD is quite straightforward and is really quite fuss free. The controls are neatly layed out and easy to get to (figure 1). Most of the buttons are iconized and quite intuitive to users familiar with a CD player. I find the motion speed slider icon really ambiguos and didn't know what it was until I looked it up in help. I also found another set of controls neatly hidden away by a sliding door. If it wasn't for the red triangular arrow, I would not have known that it was clickable and that it would reveal another set of controls to me (figure 2). The graphics isn't really fancy but it gets the job done. Overall the software is easy to use and should not pose any problems to those users who just wants to watch DVD movies on their PC.

Here are some screen shots of the WinDVD control panel. Notice the red triangular tab in figure 1 and the hidden drawer in figure 2.

Figure 1

Figure 2

The decoded video quality was good but certain decompression artifacts are still visible if scrutinized. I think this is acceptable given that no additional hardware was required to achieve this. There are some occasional tearing of some frames but it was very minor. I have only noticed the effect once or twice during the entire review. I believe that software decoding will get better and it is just a matter of time. Meanwhile WinDVD does a decent job of it and is sufficient for current use.

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Conclusion

Overall the Sony DDU220E-06 DVD ROM drive is a good and solid product. It was also easy to use and setup. The software supplied was easy to use and did not require any special configuration to work. The DVD ROM 6X capability is a plus but not an immediate advantage to the user since mainstream entertainment titles are still on CD ROMs. The cost of the drive is still quite high compared to CD ROM drives of much higher speed. At around S$175, it is more than twice the price of those 48X CD ROM drives available in the market today. With the right combination of hardware, software and setup you can turn your PC into a very expensive DVD player. If you are a movie buff and spend a lot of time watching VCDs on your PC and want to watch movies with better video quality, it is time to upgrade to something a whole lot better.

I would expect DVD drives to pick up real soon once we begin to see the emergence of DVD-R and DVD-RAM but first they need to be affordable to PC users and appeal to the mass market. I can't wait for that to happen. Although Christmas is at least 3 months away, my wish this Christmas is a DVD-R drive ;-)

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DVD-ROM RATING

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