Over at http://www.dvdwriters.co.uk you can read the world's first review of the new Pioneer DVR-A05 4 speed DVD writer. Part of the conclusion: "Pioneer has finally delivered on what we and most others wanted most in a DVD writer and that was an increase in DVD recording speeds. There is no disputing that the speed at which new DVD writers record to DVD-Rs at is light years ahead of the 1st generation drives - the A05 only needs 15mins to writes a whole 4.7GB of data. And it continues "...We were slightly disappointed with the A05's CD writing ability, mainly its CD-R maximum writing speed of 16 X and its relatively slow re-write speed. It's interesting to note that the preliminary product specifications show that Pioneer had faster CD recordable features and higher DVD-ROM read speeds in mind but decided against implementing them.

We were pleased that Pioneer added support for writing in DAO-RAW mode - a useful feature used by Clone-CD for backing up games (in countries that permit it). This addition isn't all that it appears to be as its performance was so bad that it's pretty ineffective - it failed to backup any of our games and took long time to read them!"

Click upon the 'Source' button to review the entire article. Too bad 4X DVD-R writing tests are missing...