detail information

We have just seen the first 12x DVD-writers appearing in stores, and here we have it; the first 16X DVD-Writer! Big thanks to BenQ for sending out an early pre-release drive of their upcoming DW1600A DVD-Writer. This is not a finished product yet and the full specifications are just released. So in this short preview we will only take a look at how fast 16x speed is and look at how the writing quality is at 16x. And we will of course answer the question everyone has: Will any 8x DVD+R media work at 16x?

Short specifications overview:

Writing DVD+R discs: 16x
Writing DVD+RW discs: 4x
Writing DVD+R Dual Layer discs: 2.4x
Writing CD-R discs: 40x
Writing CD-RW discs: 24x
Reading DVD-Discs: 16x
Reading CD-Discs: 40x
Access time CD/DVD: 120ms
Buffer: 2Mb

The specifications seems very good but we would like to see 48x CD-Writing and 48x CD-Reading speeds as some other manufacturers is preparing 16x DVD-Recorders capable of 48x CD-Reading and writing. And at such high writing speeds as 16x we would like to see a larger buffer to keep the dataflow as clean and stable as possible. A buffer of 16Mb would for sure have been at least a little help to keep the dataflow constant and clean. It doesn't support DVD-R/RW either, but BenQ is already preparing new models supporting this.

Test machine:

For this article we will be using a computer with the following configuration:

Hardware:

⋅         Motherboard: Gigabyte GA -8KNXP with Intel i875P chipset.
⋅         Processor: Intel Pentium 4 2,8GHz 800MHz FSB with Hyper Threading support.
⋅         RAM: 1Gb PC3500 DDR
⋅         GFX: ATI Radeon 9800 pro
⋅         Sound: SB Audigy 2
⋅         Hard disks: 2 x Hitachi Deskstar 7k250 160Gb S-ATA in RAID 0 on the i875P S-ATA RAID controller.

Software:

Windows XP professional is installed on the computer along with Service Pack 1 for windows XP. We will be using the following software in this review:

⋅         Ahead Nero Burning ROM version 6.3.1.15
⋅         Ahead Nero CD/DVD Speed v3.01
⋅         Ahead Nero InfoTool v2.21
⋅         K-Probe v2.1.0

What's inside the box?

We did only get a white box containing the drive and some media/software:

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 (RecordNow! 7.10 and DLA 4.90)
⋅         Intervideo software installation CD (WinDVD creator 2 and WinDVD 4)
⋅         BenQ software installation CD (BenQ Booktype tool v8.2 and BenQ Q-Video 2.0)
⋅         Mitsubishi 2.4x Dual layer media
⋅         Philips 16x DVD+R media
⋅         Taiyo Yuden 8x DVD+R media
⋅         CD containing Nero CD-Speed 3.0

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

We got the black version of the drive, beside this it's pretty plain.

Since this is a pre-release sample the sticker is not finished yet and there is just a generic sticker, plus an extra sticker with some hand written text. Our drive is manufactured May 2004 in

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 B5A9, as we could see it lacks support for reporting C2 error information. And there is no DVD-R/RW writing support. And as usual we may say; we would like to see Mount Rainier support as well as a larger buffer.

And another shot from Nero Burning ROM:

We do not really find anything alarming here, but Mount Rainier support as well as a larger buffer would have been nice.

Let us take a look at the DVD-writing technology used by the BenQ DW1600A:

The BenQ DW1600A uses CAV, (Constant Angular Velocity) to write at 16x. The Average speed is 11.32x and total writing time is 6 minutes and 7 seconds. The average speed is lower and the writing time is higher than it could have been due to the Walking OPC generation 2 using some time to constantly adjust the writing quality, we could se this as constant dips in the speed curve. Let us compare it to an 8x BenQ drive, the Benq DW822A:

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 and a total writing time of 8 minutes and 21 seconds. Again we could see that the curve is pretty bumpy due to the walking OPC (Generation 1) control this drive uses.

As we could see there is 2 minutes and 14 second in difference between the BenQ DW822A at 8x and the BenQ DW1600A at 16x.

Continue to the next page and read about writing performance in Nero and quality/readability of the written discs...

Conclusion

Writing tests and quality tests.