CDRLabs.com

Looks pretty good for a disc rated at only 2.4x.

http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/11693

The drive is supposedly out in Europe. Has anyone seen it in the US or Canada?

Nope, none showing up here yet... I can ask around though

Nothing that I've seen on this side of the pond.

I was looking around for it last week.

That drive looks kick @$$.
A "First look" article is posted here: http://www.cdfreaks.com/article/193

As much as I dislike it when websites try to get a jump on the competition by doing a "preview", I still think its pretty funny that CD Freaks' preview is better than most websites' full reviews.

Your right about that one,Ian.

Point is I don't like the big announced pre-views just to be worls first.
If a review would take much time and some info is that interresting to release quickly then a quick post with a few interresting points on a board is a better option I personally think.

While it's nice to see CDFreaks testing with a drive other then a LiteON, I really don't like how all the quality testing was done on the BenQ DW1640 itself.... since no one knows how well it tests discs for quality. Now it could be argued that we should expect it to be roughly equivilant to the BenQ DW1620.... but I for one prefer NOT to assume such things until they can be at least partially proven.

However, this *IS* only a pre-review, so I'm not going to be too harsh If nothing else, the recording times are quite nice! And if the DW1640 *does* test in the same ballpark as the DW1620, then those figure blow away any other competing drive for 16x recording! (looking at the jitter scores specifically).

I am looking forward to getting my own test unit and seeing just how good the drive is on a very wide variaty of media