The HOST (Holographic Optical Storage Team) tester is an apparatus specifically designed and constructed to test holographic data storage media under conditions similar to those of a product, and to allow virtually any desired experimental parameters, such as sample orientation or reference beam angle, to be varied with complete freedom and control. It was designed with custom optics that provide diffraction-limited imaging superior to what the media allow, thereby ensuring that if inadequate image quality was observed when a piece of medium was tested, one could be sure that this was due to the material under test, and was not an artifact of the tester. The construction of the tester has been desribed in detail in [1]. Here we wish to discuss the quantitative presentation of media test results in terms of bit error rate (BER). It is evidently essential to have a numerical measure of the quality of the data that is received after transmission through the recording channel in order to characterize the performance of the tester itself, as well as the suitability of the recording medium being tested.