First, let’s burn a DVD+R disc at the maximum, 16x speed. The level of errors would grow up considerably on the outermost tracks of the disc with the previous version of the firmware. Has anything changed?

The write graphs are similar, but the drive took 40 seconds less to do the burning with the newer firmware. That’s a nice surprise. As for the quality of the resulting disc, it has improved conspicuously. There’s no spike of errors at the end of the disc, and thus there are fewer PI errors and failures in total (in four times, almost). So, the BenQ DW1620 produces discs of an excellent quality at 16x with the new firmware. We haven’t seen a better result with any other drive.

Of course, the earlier observed problem about the unreadability of the outermost tracks of the resulting disc isn’t present here – the disc is read without errors. The read graph is clear and smooth, without any fluctuations of the speed.

The quality of the disc’s first layer is still lower, but there are fewer errors (75% less PI errors and 87% less PI failures). That’s an impressive result, isn’t it? Of course, there’s still something left for further improvement, but we can’t but acknowledge the manufacturer’s serious approach to correcting its own faults.