Model Description

We received a retail sample of the drive with all its accessories. Take note of the text on the face side of the package that reads, “Burns 8x media at 12x or higher”. It is kind on the manufacturer’s part to have tested this option for both DVD+R and DVD-R formats and to have published a list of compatible discs at its website. So, besides this optical drive you also get an interface cable (ATA/66), an audio cable, a pack of fasteners, a user manual, a warranty, an installation guide, and a disc with software for burning discs and creating DVD Video copies and with a special utility from BenQ that can change the book type of the recorded media. That’s a standard menu of accessories, in fact. But there are also two blank write-once media for 16x speed here, DVD+R both:

• Disc Type = DVD+R (Single Layer)
• Disc MID = 50 48 49 4C 49 50 53 00 (PHILIPS.)
• Disc TID = 43 31 36 (C16)
• Nominal Capacity = 4.38GB
• Manufacturer Maybe = Philips Electronics

And one 16x DVD-R blank:

• Disc Type = DVD-R (Single Layer)
• Disc MID = 44 41 58 4F 4E 30 (DAXON0)
• Disc TID = 30 38 53 00 00 00 (08S...)
• Nominal Capacity = 4.38GB
• Manufacturer Maybe = Daxon Inc.

I should confess I haven’t yet seen DVD-R 16x discs for real, so now I’ve got an opportunity to check out the quality of a 16x DVD-R disc burned at its rated speed. The more so, as the drive only agreed to write a DVD-R 8x disc at 12x speed.

The design of the front panel differs in the OEM and retail versions of the DW1620. It is very typical and plain-looking in the first case, whereas the retail variant is quite original and comes in three color schemes (light beige, black and silvery metallic) so you won’t have troubles finding a device that would match the color of your system case (but unfortunately you don’t get interchangeable front panels with the drive). There’s a bare minimum of controls and indicators on the front panel – an eject button, a hole to extract the disc when the drive is powered down, and an activity indicator. This latter indicator is highly informative: it is green when the disc is being read and red during a burn session. The green color also signals that there’s a disc in the drive. This is in fact everything you might want this indicator to show. The eject button is a thin plastic bar rather than a traditional large oval or rectangular shape. The “bar” is quite handy as it has a clear “click” (like the keyboard keys have) and its shape and the protruding front won’t let your finger slip off. This solution looks cute, like the front panel on the whole for that matter. The tray of this drive is made of black plastic. Plextor claims the use of black materials for the tray reduces the jitter and the number of read/write errors, but I’d say that the black tray serves aesthetical more than practical means, especially coupled with the black front panel. The rear panel of the drive is standard; the interface connectors are labeled, but the labels are hard to read on the black plastic. There are no vent holes and no active cooling, but the drive remains quite cool at work anyway, while the dust won’t come easily in.

On the drive’s bottom, there are damping pads for the chips on the outward side of the PCB, and some noise-absorbing foam-rubber inlays.

The drive is based on the new Nexperia PNX7860E chipset from Philips coupled with an analog preprocessor Philips TZA1047HL. Philips itself is going to build its new optical drive models on this chipset. The previous model from BenQ, the DW1600, also employed it, by the way.