Part of the conclusion:

Benq's new writer is much better than the ones they put out under the Acer name. However, it's still not quite on the same level as the 40x writers from Lite-On and Plextor. The drive did very well at some things, but not others. For example, while the drive's CD read speeds are rated at 48x, it had a hard time reaching these speeds with pressed and CD-R media in our tests. However, it had one of the fastest CD-RW read speeds we've seen and some very good seek times. The CRW4012P also did very well when doing DAE. In our tests we found that the drive was even faster than the Plextor PX-W4012TA when ripping audio. But, when it came to reading scratched or dirty discs, it created a lot of errors.

And then there was the CRW4012P's writing performance. Due to a pretty conservative Z-CLV implementation, the drive is a few seconds slower than the Plextor and Lite-On drives. Unfortunately, I found that it's also a little slower than some of the 32x writers I've tested and the media compatibility was also so-so. I was able to write at 40x with quite a bit of media, but the drive was not able to do this reliably with some of our test media, even with its conservative writing speeds.

The CRW4012P has its highs and lows. Unfortunately, some of the lows keep it from being one of the top drives on the market. I might have even been able to overlook the slower writing speeds if the drive had been able to read CD's at 48x and had better media compatibility. Hopefully Benq can tweak these things in a future firmware update because with the low seek times, fast CD-RW read speeds and great DAE speeds, the CRW4012P definitely has potential.