Philips JR12CDRWK/00 User Manual page 3

1.2 Writing speed and strategy
Reliability before speed...
With Philips advanced CD-RW or DVD+RW drives you can be sure of the data that you read and
write.
The primary mission of the high-speed CD-RW or DVD+RW drives that Philips produces is to
safeguard your written data. The drive will always choose the best speed for writing your discs to
ensure the highest data integrity possible. This optimal speed may be lower than that claimed by the
disc manufacturer, or the disc may be defective in some way (dirty, scratched, etc.), but we take the
view that the most important thing is your data, so we go to the lower speed.
Not only do we safeguard your data for playback on your Philips CD-RW drive, but we ensure
compatibility with all major CD-ROM drives on the market through exhaustive testing in our Quality
Laboratories. You can send your finalized CD-R disc to anybody in the world with the knowledge that
they will be able to read it.
We recommend that you use only Philips CD-R and CD-RW discs to ensure the highest quality written
data and audio discs. See also: http://www.ce-europe.philips.com
The drive will perform an optimization check (OPC) to determine the best writing strategy at the
highest (re)writing speed possible. If it finds none, it will try to find the best writing strategy for lower
(re)writing speeds. The test is done in the OPC area (the inside of the disc). If the OPC area is not
representative of the rest of the disc (which may be often the case with media of marginal quality), this
may result in subsequent read problems on third-party CD-ROMs and even on Philips drives. So we
guarantee only that the specific Philips drive which wrote the disc will be able to read it back, at the
highest possible speed the drive determined for that disc.
Recently a number of new proprietary technologies have been developed by Philips that overcome the
problems generated by non-optimal circumstances during writing to discs. These new technologies
encompass: " Seamless Link" , "Thermo Balanced Writing", and Self-Learning.