Digital Research 16x Internal DVD+R/RW Drive

[hydrogen]

Office Depot has a Digital Research 16x Internal DVD+R/RW Drive on sale this week.

149.97 - 20.00 Digital Research Mail-In Rebate = 129.97


Do, you guys think it's a Benq 1600? If that would be really cool. I have been looking forward to that drive coming out.

[Dartman]

I'm going to pick mine up in about an hour and then we'll all know. As far as I and others can tell the BenQ is the only DL drive with plus only support and 16x speed so it's almost a sure thing.

[Dartman]

Its a BenQ 1600 allright, mine was made in june, just plugged it in now.

[hydrogen]

Awesome. It finally made it to the US. I hope it's a good drive.

Could you post some scans when you get time?

[dmagic1]

Nice.
BB usually carries Digital Research drives too. I don't know if they have this one yet. Is the rebate limited to OD?

[digitaldoc]

That's a nice drive. Great that it has made it to the the US.

[Ian]

I can't wait for the DVD-R/RW upgrade.

[Dartman]

Me too

[eliminator]

review...

[Dartman]

OK the drive will not overclock any 4x media yet, it does overclock some 8x media but none of the stuff I have will. It's dog slow at tests and only reads at like 1 to 2x max, mostly1x. It does not report PIF errors at all yet, it does report jitter though which is nice.
The disks I have burned appear to test pretty well with low jitter and all the other things depending on which drive I test with I haven't really played a movie yet to see how it does but I think it'll be a good machine for most set tops to deal with. I don't have any more DL media right now to see how it does on those BUT it does automaticly set plus nedia to dvd-ROM
They have released 3 firmwares for it recently and each one seems to help the drive so they seem to be serious about making this a great burner. It also appears to read better then my NEC 2500 but I don't know if it really burns better but so far I'd say it's equal to it for quality of burns, but like I said it only does rated speed for 4x media right now though that may change soon.
It reads regular media at about 8x max so far, haven't tried a pressed disk yet.
That's it so far.

[digitaldoc]

I wonder why it only reads at to 2x. That doesn't sound that great.

[Dartman]

We think it's a firmware limitation or glitch. The Nutek uses a similar chipset and it's speeds are normal, so maybe BenQ and Phillips will release a update that fixes it, I believe NickW and others have made them aware of it.

[KenW]

Yes they have been contacted by NicW , that is BenQ has been, here are some BenQ scans on 1600. I got from officedepot.

http://forums.speedlabs.org/index.php/topic,623.0