Hot Update: BenQ DW1620 with New B7T9 Firmware Tested. Side-by-Side Comparison vs. B7P9 Firmware

There’s a common notion among the users of BenQ’s optical drives that this manufacturer takes the problem of firmware updates most seriously and really solves all or almost all noticed defects of a drive model in new versions of its firmware – contrary to many other companies that usually update the firmware just to expand the list of supported media formats or to bring some minor corrections into the drive’s burn strategies or error-correction mechanisms.

Today we have an opportunity to check out in practice how BenQ approaches the problem of firmware updates. We made use of firmware version B7P9 when writing our review of the DW1620 model, but version B7T9 has appeared recently and we will now try to see its effect on the operation of the device in this article. We do so not because of mere curiosity but because the BenQ DW1620, a highly promising optical drive overall, had problems at writing some of the formats. So today we will see if the users can trust the manufacturer – is the new version of the firmware free from the errors we noticed earlier?

We first launch informational utilities to see if the drive’s functionality has changed in any way.

No changes have occurred – the functionality and the speed formula have remained the same. Now we can proceed to the more interesting part of the review. We will try to compare the two versions of the drive’s firmware at writing the media types the older version had problems with.

The CD-RW format comes first. Working with firmware version B7P9 the drive had too many C1 errors at the beginning of the disc (with a CD-RW disc rated for 24x speed) which was an indication of an imperfect operation of the OPC mechanism before the burn process.

Our complaints about the drive’s burning 32x CD-RWs were much more serious as there was a catastrophically high rate of C1 errors. Although the DW1620 itself could read the written disc without problems, we would not have warranted it to be readable in other optical drives. Let’s see if this situation is different with the new version of the firmware.