The two participating drives use different burn algorithms at 8x speed, and the LG drive is a little ahead in speed. That’s because both drives achieve their max speeds almost the same moment, so P-CAV brings no advantages over Z-CLV here, while WOPC and BLER OPC technologies slow the BenQ DW1620 down somewhat. As a result, the LG drive did the burning in 15 seconds faster than its opponent. As for the quality, the BenQ DW1620 has quite a few PI errors and PI failures at the beginning of the disc, and though WOPC corrects the situation quickly enough, the average level of PI errors about 100 can’t be considered low. So, the burn quality of the BenQ is rather average here, fading in contrast to the excellent results of the LG GSA-4160B. The resulting disc was read by both drives without problems. Anyway, 8x DVD-R burning needs improvement, as the BenQ is immaculate with discs of that format at 4x. Let’s try to increase the burn speed more.

The quality of the DVD-R disc written at 12x by BenQ DW1620

The burning was successful (note that the drive uses the progressive P-CAV algorithm at this speed, too), but the quality is far from perfect. There’s a noticeable spike of PI errors and failures at the beginning of the disc. The number of errors is high, although not above the acceptable level. Here we see again the real help from WOPC technology as the level of PI errors and failures goes down immediately, as we already saw above. It seems like the developers relied on Walking OPC without paying much attention to the initial laser calibration before the burn session. Yes, real-time laser correction is good, but it’d be better to start out with good quality, too. This should be corrected in future versions of the drive’s firmware. The disc, however, was read without any speed slow-downs.