BENQ DW 1600 review

Conclusion

The BenQ DW 1600 behaved very well in our review on all but the Ritek DVD+R D/L media.BenQ are starting to get a name for deliveringlow cost high end DVDRW products with High recording speeds of up to 16x on our supplied Phillips DVD+R media as well as achieving some very good transfer speeds for both pressed and recordable DVD.

During our tests the drive reached transfer speeds of up to 8.2x ripping in DVDDecrypter for some DVD media and reached speeds of 40x for both pressed and recordable CD media. Now add the fact that it records CDRmedia at 40x as well as High speed CDRW media at 24x and you have one very versatile drive. Add to this the fact that BenQs very effective and easy to use Book Type management utility allows you to change your DVD+R media to that of DVD-ROM, allowing for more compatibility on standalone DVD players that normally dont like DVD+R media and options such as Write right technologies, Tilt control and rate optimal power control and BenQ offer the consumer a very competitve package. On top of that BenQ also offer a free upgrade to make the 1600 a 1620 with High speed DVD-R recording abilities too.

Double Layer recording tests on the Verbatim media where very good with the drive recognising and recording to the media at the rated 2.4x, with the media being playable without a problem, but unfortuanately at the time of writing this review, the Ritek Double Layer media was writable in the BenQ 1600 but the resulting disc was not readable in any device. We are assured by BenQ that this is only a temporary measure and that new firmware upgrades will be available fix any reported issues with the 1600 in the very near future.

Although the 16x DVD+R recording speed was not achieved with any of our media, we where able to record at over 12x with CopyToDVD 3 and the included Phillips media as well as recording to Traxdata 8x DVD+R at 12x and as more high speed media is released, we hope to update this review to show them recording in this drive. All our verification and disc scan tests showed no errors present on all the recorded media used during the writing of this review.

The drive also scored a perfect 100 in our CD Speed Advanced DAE transfer tests, and no sync errors where found during the tests, even when extracting an Audio CD at its fastest possible speed.

The stock firmware of the drive had problems recording only 1 of our inserted recordable media properly, but we are assured this will be fixed soon with the introduction of a new official firmware, but you can, as already stated adjust the firmware if you are feeling brave and get the actual speed for any wrongly recognised media.

With the introduction of Dual Layer recordable media it is nice to know that this drive fully supports the reading of recordable D/L straight 'out of the box' without any firmware adjustments being needed. The bundled software worked as stated also and the Book Type management utility was successfully used to make a non playable DVD+R media play as a DVD-ROM on our CYberhome 512 standalone DVD Player which is notorious for its dislike of our tested DVD+R media.

CDR-Zone.COM can only say good things about this drives DVD+R recording capabilities and have no problem recommending it to our readers. Once the free firmware upgrade to the 1620 is available and DVD-R support is implemented it will offer the consumer an amazing range of features at what can be described as a 'budget' price, but don't let that fool you into thinking it is a budget drive in performance.

Need a new drive with High CD\DVD recording and transfer speeds as well as DVD+R D/L recording capability from a name that is quicklybecoming a leading force in the optical world? - then this could the exact drive for your purposes.

Tested on:

K Probe We recommend BigPockets as the place to buy this DVD recorder With shipping throughout Europe: