BenQ"s latest product can burn DVDs at 16x, which means you can burn a DVD in less than eight minutes. Best part is that this burner only costs $149. Compared to the price of other burners BenQ"s burner is a pretty good deal. Sill this reminds me all too much of the CD-RW speed wars not too long ago.
The already active DVD burner market is getting another speed upgrade, from 12X to 16X for write-once media. We looked at a drive with the new capability: BenQ"s $149 DW1600 DVD+ReWriter double-layer DVD burner, a shipping IDE unit that can write DVD+R at 16X and does it with a few brands of 8X media.
In PC World Test Center tests with bundled software, the device took a slothful 7 minutes, 45 seconds to write 4.35GB of data on preproduction 16X media. In our hands-on testing with Ahead Nero Burning ROM, however, the drive wrote a 4.35GB DVD movie structure in 6 minutes flat. Software and vagaries in preproduction discs are probably behind the speed difference. Alas, that 6 minutes represents only a 30-second boost over the speed of 12X drives.