BenQ DW800A DVD+RW - Page 14

Conclusion

BenQ DW800A is placed among the competition with very good DVD+R/RW writing capabilities. It is a fast 8x recorder for DVD+R media and also fast for 4x DVD+RW discs. It managed to burn disc at 7:58min and 14:12min for DVD+R and RW respectively, which are very good times.

As far as it concerns the DVD writing quality, BenQ we can easily say that has a lot. All the media brands we tested were measured and showed low PI/PO values.

As a CD-R recorder BenQ was again very good, although its 24x supported writing speed. Once again the measurement that we made, with UMDoctor II and from 3T jitter values, revealed very good quality far away from possible errors. However, due to competition, we would like a faster maximum speed over 24x that the drive already supports.

We must commit that we expect higher rewriting speed, since 10x is rather low, and thus the other two drives, wearing the same chipset, support 24x.

In the reading part BenQ showed great capabilities with both CD and DVD discs.

The ability of the BenQ drive for error correction is very good such with CDs as with DVD's. The drive managed to read accurately all of our defected DVD test discs, ignoring the size of the defected area, which was 3mm in many cases. In CD part the drive performed well but it could be better, especially with the CD-Check Audio Test.

BenQ DW800A drive can easily handle SecuRom v2 and SafeDisc v2.51 games protections. However the latest's version of SafeDisc are not supported by the drive which is a minor problem.

However the drive manage to rip and playback all of the protected Audio CDs we tried. Key2Audio and CDS200 was not a problem for the drive. The drive managed to rip also 90/99min discs.

Another positive feature of BenQ drive is the book type change option. The user can easily change either the drive or the media to DVD-ROM so it could be compatible with all players.

The BenQ DW800A is currently available in the market approximately at the price of 140~150 euro, which is a very competitive price, . We believe that the drive had generally very good performance and it is a very good purchase, at least if your needs comply to the DVD plus recording format.