Positive:

• Very Quiet driver operation

• Drive Writes Lightscribe Discs

• Fast pressed CD-ROM and pressed Audio-CD Extraction

• Seek times are very good

• Good writing speed with both DVD+R DL 8x and DVD-R DL 4x

• Reads and writes DVD-RAM at 12x

• Reads Single Layer pressed DVD-Video at up to 16x

• Supports scanning for Disc Quality (PI/PO)

• Writing quality is good for CD-R, DVD+R/-R, DVD-RW

• Bitsetting is supported for DVD+R, DVD+RW and DVD+R DL (booktype DVD-ROM)

• Nero OEM Suite 2 V6.6.1.6f with Lightscribe support

• Three Sheep Burner

Negative:

• Drive tray is flimsy

• Slow CD-Recordable readback

• Problems writing at 48x with Taiyo Yuden CD-R media

• Reads Double Layer pressed DVD-Video disc at only 8x

Conclusion:

Let us summarize the most important positive and negative points below:

The main positive points: The Asus DRW-1612BL is called “Multi DVD Burner” since it supports recording on all available media formats including CD-R/RW, DVD±R/±RW, DVD±R Double/Dual Layer, and DVD-RAM.  

The 16x DVD+R and DVD-R writing on our media produced good quality. The drive writes CD-R media very fast with very good quality. DVD-RAM read and write supports at 12x is a very nice feature. The Asus DRW-1612BL also supports disc quality scanning that can be use to report PI/PO errors.

The CD-ROM and Audio-CD extraction performance is very good.

The drives operation is very quiet; this is a big plus for us or anyone who appreciates a quite computer.

The main negative points: There are few issues that we would like to mention and see them improved. The Asus DRW-1612BL drive tray is very flimsy, after inserting a disc and pressing the button the tray has a slight bounce and the disc moves around, this can cause the disc to move off the tray and get stuck. While this never happened during our review it is very probable it will at some point.

Slow reading performance of Double Layer pressed DVD-Video disc at only 8x.

Final Thoughts: While the drive won’t break any speed records it did perform at its rated speeds with no problems.

To sum it all up, this is what we would say: “Asus DRW-1612BL is a good performing Internal Multi Format DVD Burner with Quiet Operation.”

By using our CD Freaks price grabber feature we found the retail Asus DRW-1612BL is listed at $46.47 (January 2007).

You may discuss/comment this review below or in this forum thread.

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