Patent ID: 8310906

Claim:
An optical disc apparatus comprising: an optical pickup comprising: a light source; an objective lens for converging a light flux emitted from said light source and forming an optical spot on an information recording plane of an optical disc; and an optical modulation unit divided into a plurality of areas for modulating an area containing a main beam of said light flux to change a shape of said optical spot; an optical modulation unit control circuit for controlling said optical modulation unit; a transversal filter with variable tap coefficients; a Viterbi decoder with variable discrimination signal levels; and a parameter setting circuit for setting said tap coefficients and said discrimination signal levels, wherein: a first optical spot is converged on a first optical disc by making said optical modulation unit be in an operation state, a first emission amount is set to said light source, first parameters are set to said transversal filter and said Viterbi decoder, and data is reproduced by converting a reproduction signal read from said first optical disc into an NRZI signal of a predetermined modulation rule by a PRML method; a second optical spot is converged by making said optical modulation unit be in a non-operation state, a second emission amount is set to said light source, and data is recorded on said first optical disc; a diameter of the second optical spot converged by making said optical modulation unit be in a non-operation state is larger than a diameter of the first optical spot converged by making said optical modulation unit be in an operation state; and after data is recorded on said first optical disc, the second optical spot is converged by making said optical modulation unit be in a non-operation state, second parameters are set to said transversal filter and said Viterbi decoder, and said recorded data is reproduced to evaluate a recording quality.