Just as manufacturers tried pushing the CD transfer rate to 52x and even 56x before DVD-writers became affordable and widespread, Samsung has now done the same but for DVD writers with the launch of world's first 22x DVD-writer.  As the majority of DVD+R and DVD-R media are only certified for up to 16x, this drive features an over-speed feature to enable 22x writing speed on 16x, 12x and even 8x media. 

The drive also features 16x DVD+R DL, 12x DVD-R DL, 12x DVD-RAM and 8X/6X DVD+RW/-RW writing performance.  Samsung claims that its 22x writing gains an additional 6% speed increase over 20x writing, taking just 4 minutes 26 seconds per DVD±R disc and also allows provides a 30% improvement in speed when writing a full 4.7GB DVD-RAM disc compared with using a 20x DVD-writer. 

Other features include SAT (Speed Adjustment Technology), SAT (Tilt Adjustment Technology), TAC (Tilt Actuator Compensation) and Double OPC (Optimum Power Control) to improve performance and write quality.  Its Magic Speed5 and ABS (Automatic Ball Balancing System) technologies help reduce vibration and noise.

It will be interesting to see how this drive performs for real and how well its writing quality stands up to the widely available 20x writers.  For the average consumer, in my opinion 16x or lower is more than sufficient, due to the small time saving in faster writing speeds potentially resulting in lower writing quality, but for companies that need to mass produce discs, a 6% performance increase potentially means 6% more discs produced in the same time compared with using 20x writers.