BenQ DW1620A Dual format & Double layer DVD Burner

 Positive:

• Supports 2.4x DVD+R Dual Layer writing
• Supports 16x DVD+/-R speed.
• Supports 4x DVD+/-RW speed.
• Very fast writer, so far it holds the speed record.
• Impressive writing quality on most DVD+R media types
• Very good writing quality on most DVD-R media types
• Excellent CD-R writing quality.
• Supports Walking OPC technology to adjust writing strategy while writing.
• Supports DAO-RAW writing.
• Supports reading and writing of full SubChannel Data.
• Good reading speed with most types of media, including DVD-Video discs.
• Good seek times.
• Fast and perfect audio extraction, also with copy protected audio discs.
• Supports reading and writing 99 minutes CD-R discs.
• Supports bitsetting for all types of DVD+R/R DL/RW media and automatically sets booktype to DVD-ROM for all these media.
• Supports advanced disc quality testing (FE/TE, PIE/PIF/POF and Jitter)
• Good retail bundle
• Supports writing many 8x DVDR discs at 12x or 16x speed, unlike most other 16x writers.

Negative:

• Only 2.4x Double layer writing (a free upgrade to 4x DVD+R DL writing is promised in November!!)
• Questionable CD-RW writing quality
• Writing quality problems with some DVD+RW and DVD-RW discs.
• Reads DVDR/RW media at only 8x compared to 12x/16x for many other new drives.
• Does not support Mt. Rainier.
• Only a ‘one sheep" writer, which gives it a disadvantage for backing up some newer PC games.
• The BenQ tools (firmware updater, bitsetting tool and disc doctor) crashes on some computer configurations.

Conclusion:

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Overall the drive is very good and according to our tests it has few serious flaws, but let us look at the most positive and negative points.

 The main positive points: First of all it uses CAV or P-CAV writing for all discs, making it faster than most other drives and in tests it is able to break the 6 minute barrier and the best result we obtained was 5 minutes and 47 seconds for a full DVD+R disc at 16x. It will be very interesting to see if any drive is able to beat this. And it also does this with excellent quality, much thanks to the Walking OPC technology. Add bitsetting and support for writing many 8x DVDR discs at 12x or 16x and you end up with a very good DVD-Writer. And it does also work great with CD-R discs. Add advanced testing features and a good retail bundle to this and you will end up missing few features at all.

The main negative points: There are hardly any big negative points, but we would like to see an improvement on DVDRW writing on some media types as well as an improvement on the BenQ programs so they work on every computer configuration.

To sum it all up, this is the best we could say: ‘Excellent writing quality with almost every disc, a good retail bundle and advanced testing features ‘� what more do you want?". We like this drive so well that we bring out the big one and give it the ‘Editors Choice award". It’s well deserved and with the great engineer team over at BenQ we think the drive will just continue to be better and better with every firmware upgrade.



You may discuss/comment this review below or in this forum thread. This forum thread may also be used to ask quastions around this drive or request additional tests.

Thanks to:

Conrexx for providing the  media used in this review. Conrexx technology is the supplier of Traxdata media as well as other Ritek media brands for whole Europe.

 For providing the That’s Write media used in this review. That’s Write focus on providing quality media at reduced prices in Europe.

 For providing some of the Memorex media used in this review. Memorex is one of the largest providers of all types of media for larger parts of the world.

 For providing us with Mirror and Miflop Extreme media. Miflop media aims at providing both cheap (INFOSMART) and expensive ( Taiyo Yuden) quality media.

For providing the RiData media used in this review. RiData is a Ritek brand and thus you are sure to get Ritek manufactured discs when buying RiData media.

 For providing the Daxon and BenQ media used in this review. Daxon manufacture high quality media for many large OEM customers lke BenQ and Sony.

 For providing the Verbatim DVD+R9 Double Layer media used in this review. Verbatim provides high quality media almost over the whole world.

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