Modern DVD Burners Compared

16x DVD-R Roundup Posted

by Yaroslav Lyssenko

[ 07/15/2005 | 10:04 PM ]

AnandTech has posted a roundup of six modern DVD writers from six different manufacturers, such as BenQ, LG, NEC, Pioneer, Sony and Toshiba. The drives were tested and compared using different types of media on them, including DVD±R, DVD±RW, DVD±R DL as well as CD-R. Since the quality and speed of a DVD drive depends not only on hardware, but other factors as well, the author used the latest drivers and firmware.

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“We updated the firmware on all of these drives at the time that we tested them. Note that there may be new versions of the firmware released since then. Henceforth, we cannot guarantee that our benchmarks will have used the latest updates at the time of publication,” warns AnandTech.

“The only drive we saw that could write to the majority of discs and quickly at that was BenQ’s DW1640. It had average performance on most of the benchmarks, but always had a successful read to go with the successful write. The only disc that it could not write to was the MKM A03 8x DVD+RW. Besides that single issue, the DW1640 has features to aid in successful writes, as well as bitsetting features to allow greater compatibility of the media to which it writes. The bitsetting utility can be downloaded from BenQ’s website. Over these 6 DVDR units, we recommend the BenQ DW1640 for its performance and reliability in writing to various types of media. Expect this drive to start showing up on retail store shelves very soon,” concludes the author.

• AnandTech: Summer 2005 16x DVDR Roundup.