detail information

What's inside the box?

On this page we will take a look at what the drive came shipped with, and take a look at the drive and its technology.

The box reflects the usual 'BenQ" colours found at most BenQ optical products nowadays. That sticker looks interesting, let's take a closer look at it:

Seems like there is actually a set date for the release of the dual layer capable firmware; 30. September 2004. To some this may seem a bit late, but we do not think it's an issue as media will not hit the market soon. When it does, it will be at prices that normal uses will not want to pay for it.

Notice that our drive is a pre-release drive so the bundle is not complete! Here is what we got:

⋅         The drive itself
⋅         Sonic software installation CD
⋅         Intervideo software installation CD
⋅         BenQ software installation CD
⋅         Sonic RecordNow/DLA user manual
⋅         InterVideo WinCinema users guide
⋅         BenQ QVideo and Booktype Management user manual
⋅         Quick installation guide.

The retail version should also include: Screws, ATA66 IDE cable and audio cable.

Beside that there is no empty media included this is a really impressive bundle and other manufacturers should learn from BenQ. The amount of software is overwhelming and so is the amount of printed manuals as well '? something that we have not seen from most other manufacturers.

Now it's time to take a look at the drive itself:

A pretty plain looking front bezel we may say, this is also one of the few drives that still has the play/next track button.

Since this is a pre-release sample there is no real sticker on the drive, only a sticker with some hand written model information. The serial number is '6"; let us hope that the drive is still representative for the shipping retail drives.

On the back of the drive there are from the left: two undocumented pins; digital audio connector; analogue audio connector; pins and jumper to set the drive to cable select, slave or master; IDE connector and power connector.

We quickly installed the drive without any problems and here is a screenshot from Nero info tool:

Our drive came shipped with firmware B3BC, and there is no firmware upgrades available yet. It does not support DVD-RAM reading/writing and Mt. Rainier, but few drives support this. It also lacks support for reporting C2 errors. But it's nice to see that it has a large 8Mb buffer, unlike most other drives.

And another shot from Nero Burning ROM:

We do not really find anything alarming here, but Mount Rainier support would have been nice.

Now it's time to take a closer look at the write technology used by the BenQ DW822A:

CD-Recordable:

As we could see the BenQ DW822A uses P-CAV (Partial-Constant Angular Velocity) to write at its rated speed of 24x. This gives an average speed of 22.92x. The bumps in the curve are caused by the walking OPC technology the BenQ DW822A uses. This will of course make it slower than most other drives, but let's take a look at two other drives first:

The NEC ND-2500A uses Z-CLV, (Zone-Constant Linear Velocity), to write at its maximum speed of 32X. The drive wrote the last zone at 32X and this gives an average speed of 27.16x.

As we could see the Plextor PX-708A uses P-CAV (Partial-Constant Angular Velocity) writing strategy to reach it rated speed of 40X. This gives an average speed of 33.38x.

For comparison we have made the following table: 

As we could see it was only able to beat the Pioneer DVR-107D. It was over a minute slower than the fastest drive due to the low writing speed of only 24x.

CD-ReWritable:

The BenQ DW822A uses CLV, (Constant Linear Velocity) writing technology to write at 10X for CD-RW discs, the average speed is 9.92x. This will for sure make it a lot slower than most other modern DVD-Writers. But let's look at the result from two other drives:

The Pioneer DVR-107D uses Z-CLV, (Zone-Constant Linear Velocity), to write at its rated speed of 24x, this gives an average speed of 22.47x.

The Plextor PX-708A, with its P-CAV (Partial-Constant Angular Velocity) write speed of 24X for Ultra Speed CD-RW discs is among the faster writers due to its high starting speed of 20.01x. For a better overview we present the following comparison table:

As expected; it's the slowest drive and used over twice the time compared to the fastest drive to write the disc.

8X DVD-Writing speed:

The BenQ DW822A uses Z-CLV, (Zone-Constant Linear Velocity) to write at 8x. It uses two zones to achieve 8x speed; first zone from 0-0,4Gb is done at 6x speed; the next zone from 0.4Gb to 4,4Gb is done at 8x speed. This gives an average speed of 7.44x. Again we could see that the curve is pretty bumpy due to the walking OPC control this drive uses. Seems to a pretty fast drive, but let us compare these results with some other writers:

The NEC ND-2500A uses Z-CLV, (Zone-Constant Linear Velocity). The first zone from 0-0,8Gb is done at 4x speed, the next zone from 0,8Gb to 2,2Gb is done at 6x speed and the last zone from 2,2Gb to 4,4Gb is done at 8x. This gives an average speed of 6.80x. The speed is the same for both DVD-R and DVD+R discs.

The Plextor PX-708A also uses Z-CLV, (Zone-Constant Linear Velocity). The first zone from 0-0,7Gb is done at 6x speed; the next zone from 0,7Gb to 4,4Gb is done at 8x speed. This gives an average speed of 7.69x, look below to see a comparison table:

Not that bad, the Walking OPC control makes the writing process take a bit longer than it normally would, but after all it's just lagging 23 seconds behind the fastest drive.

Features and techniques:

Now it's time to take a look at the features and techniques of this drive. Here is some short information found at BenQ's webpages.

Smart-Write Control
Walking Optimal Power Calibration(WOPC) dynamically adjusts burning power to ensure the best writing quality throughout the whole burning process. In addition, the patented "Tilted Control" always keeps the writing angle at 90 degrees on the disc surface to ensure uniform writing.

This should ensure that writing quality is always as good as it could possibly be. It makes the drive slightly slower, and could be seen as bumps on the transfer graph when doing a write transfer test in for example Nero CD/DVD-Speed.

Anti-Interruption System
"Lossless Link" and "Seamless Link" prevent buffer underrun when writing.

Even if the drive has an 8Mb buffer it's required to have a buffer underrun prevention system as 8Mb won't even last a second when writing at 8x DVD speed.

Changing book type tool (bitsetting).

This drive also supports bitsetting, which basically means that you may change the Book type of DVD+R and DVD+RW discs to DVD-ROM. Some players do not allow DVD+R/RW media to be played and with this bitsetting trick you may change the Book type to DVD-ROM, now the discs are identified as DVD-ROM discs by the player and will play. There is a booktype management utility found on the bundled BenQ software disc, and there is even a printed user manual bundled.

You don't need to do anything as the drive will write DVD+R and DVD+RW disc as DVD-ROM by default. But if you do not want to have the book type changed you have to use this utility. The utility is also useful to check the booktype of an already recorded disc. We of course wrote a disc and checked that it works as it should; to verify that it worked we used DVDinfoPRO and Nero CD/DVD speed.

Start DVDinfoPRO and click the Media button and you should get something like this:

As we could see the disc Book type is now DVD-ROM

Another quick test is to start Nero CD-Speed and look at the disc information:

Which should also say DVD-ROM.

We recommend writing DVD+R discs with booktype set to DVD-ROM as this improves the compatibility of the disc.

Notice: We had some problems with the booktype tool and it seems it will not work on every computer configuration, problems we ran into:

-The whole computer locked if we had optical drives connected to an ITE GigaRAID IDE controller (yes the controller supports optical drives).
-The program crashed when any optical USB/Firewire devices were connected.

So there is room for improvements on the Booktype tool.

Included software:

Now it's time to look at the included software, and comment it if needed. Notice that we may not use the included software in our performance testing part of the review.

WinDVD 4:

The drive includes InterVideo WinDVD 4 to play DVD and VCD movies. WinDVD is among our favourite DVD players and is in our opinion a good choice.

WinDVD Creator 2:

BenQ have bundled InterVideo WinDVD Creator 2 for creating DVD and VCD movies. The program appears to have a lot of options, due to our limited time we do not have time to look into all the features offered by this program. We did start the program and made a project in a hurry:

As we already mentioned we have no time to fully test out this piece of software, but out from what we could see it really has a lot of features and options.

Sonic RecordNow 6.7 Plus:

BenQ have bundles Sonic RecordNow 6.7 Plus with the drive, RecordNow is a small and very easy program to use, maybe a bit too easy as it's not the most feature filled program. But new users will probably like it due to the easy use and clean look.

Sonic DLA 4.60:

Sonic DLA (Drive Letter Access) installs, but is invisible until you right click on your writer, now you are able to see the format option.

Here you may select to do a full format or quick format as well as giving the disc a Volume label. Notice that Sonic DLA will not install if you have EasyCDCreator, DirectCD, Nero, InCD or some other similar programs installed. You have to uninstall all those programs (Which is very annoying for users using multiple writing programs) for Sonic DLA to install, this is due to the fact that Sonic DLA conflicts with all those programs! Beside this it's a good packet writing program as far as we could say.

BenQ QVideo 2.0:

This is how BenQ presents their QVideo 2.0 program:

Instant DV to DVD - QVideo 2.0 
With BenQ's exclusive QVideo 2.0 you can instantly transfer your digital video footage into a DVD disc without spending hours completing capturing, rendering, authoring and burning processes. 

As you see Qvideo is used to transfer data from capturing devices directly to DVD-Discs with almost no delays, this of course saves some time.

All in all, the software collection bundled with this drive is outstanding and we have not seen any drives with the same amount of software bundled, and even better; there are printed manuals for software included with the drive! For software and documentation the drive gets a big plus in our book.

Now that we have finished examining the drive and its writing strategies it's time to head on to next page, which is reading performance test…

Introduction

Reading performance