detail information

Positive:

• LightScribe enabled burner
• Nice retail bundle
• Supports DVD+R at 16x
• Extracts CD-DA at full speed with EAC
• Excellent writing quality on CD-Rs
• Good overall media support
• Very good writing quality on some DVD+R/RW/R9 DL media
• Supports bitsetting for all types of DVD+R/R9 DL/RW (sets auto. BookType to DVD-ROM)
• Partial support for disc quality scanning (slow read speed and no PIF reporting)
• Supports DAO-RAW writing

Negative:

• Only 8x DVD-R write speed
• Poor DVD-R write quality
• Not able to achieve full 16x write speed on USB
• No media overspeed support
• A 'no sheep" burner

Conclusion:

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

The main positive points: The first point we would like to mention is the LightScribe feature/technique. The LightScribe feature works very well and does very nice quality burns. We are looking forward to LightScribe writing speedups as well to see how the technique develops in the future. Next point - the HP dvd640e DVD Writer also extracts CD-DA disc at full speed which is an advantage when ripping/extracting music. The drive offers good writing quality on CD-R. The drive also sets the BookType automatically to DVD-ROM on DVD+R/RW/R+9 DL media, which leads to better compatibility on Standalone devices. HP has included a very nice software package with the retail drive.

The main negative points: DVD-R write quality is suspect on the sample drive provided by HP producing many coasters. An optimized USB bridge and drive firmware may have produced a full 16x write speed on USB, maybe HP can fix this in an update. Media overspeed support is less important as more 16x certified media shows on the market each month.

To sum it all up, this is what we would say: 'Overall, this drive with the tested firmware is a poor effort for a DVD writer. However the LightScribe capability is great and produces some impressive results.  Further, limitation of DVD-R to 8x writing speeds detracts from the appeal of this drive. Two months passed waiting for HP to issue a firmware update for the drive, none was forthcoming. Right at completion of the review testing HP did release an update and limited testing was done but no improvements were noted. If you are looking to get a LightScribe capable burner we would suggest you give this one a pass and look to the LG and BenQ drives instead".

By using our price grabber feature cdfreaks.pricegrabber we found the drive listed at $132.00 (July 15, 2005).