BenQ DW1600A DL Recorder - Page 8

- CD-R Format

The drive supports 8X, 12X, 16X (CLV), 32X, 40X (P-CAV) writing speeds.

According to Nero CDSpeed, the drive reached the maximum 40X speed. The test started at 17.73X and finished at 40.53X having an average speed of 30.32X. Click on the image below to see the whole graph.

- CD-R Recording Times

For the burning tests, we created an 80min data compilation through Nero Burning Rom, recorded the data on a 700MB disc. DW1600A finished the task in 3:30 minutes, when writing at 40X, 14 seconds slower than the other two drives.

The writing performance varies according to the inserted media, as our tests showed. Below is a chart listing the corresponding recording times for various media.

The best performance came with Taiyo Yuden 80min 52X media with 207secs (3:27mins). The highest recording time was with Mam 80min 52X media at 348secs (5:48mins) as the drive could not write at the maximum speed with this media and only 16X writing speed was achieved.

- Other features

The DW1600A supports overburning, writing up to 99min. and can read/write CD-Text.

- CD-RW Format

The DW1600A supports 16X CLV, 24X Z-CLV rewriting speeds with Ultra Speed Rewritable Media (US-RW). The drive also writes at 4X CLV with NS CD-RW and 10X CLV with HS-RW discs.

Below you can see the Nero CD-DVD Speed writing simulation test with blank 24x US-RW media from Mitsubishi Chemicals. We also used Nero Burning Rom in order to burn a data disc with 24x US-RW media from MC. The data compilation we burned had a size of 651 MB and the duration of the recording process was 3:49 minutes.

It should be noted that when trying to write at 24X with firmware version B5B9, the drive supported 24X P-CAV but a different curve was produced. WOPC must have been added for CD-RW media in the B5C9 firmware. Also, using B5B9 firmware version, it was not possible to write at 16X, getting an error message from Nero software. Of course, this problem was solved with the new firmware version B5C9. You can check the graph produced from Nero CD-DVD Speed and the error message when trying to burn at 16X below:

- CD-RW Mount Rainier Tests

The BenQ DW1600A DL does not support the Mount Rainier format.