The Best DVD-Rewriters

We put eight drives to the test. Here are the winners

Saturday, October 11, 2003

Best Value for money: Liteon LDW-401S
Well one of our dark horses won the race. Though it supports only one format, the total performance-price bundle of the writer takes it to the tops. Lets go into the details as to why it is the winner.

Starting from the rated speeds, it has the highest speeds available in the market for the format it supports (DVD+RW), writing at 4X on both writable and re-writable disks. Furthermore, its CD writing speed is 40X, which is almost double that any other writer in the shootout (most being 24X). If all this has failed to convince you about it being a good buy, just take a look at the price. At around 12K, it is the cheapest thing around.

However it lacks the support for–R format, and writes only on +R/RW disks. It can however, read from all formats. The other shortcoming is the media support, which has been sorted out by a patch that is available at the Web site. It flashes the BIOS of the writer to make it usable with most of the available medias.

Going through the results, it writes the fastest, being second only to Sony in the DVD+R test. It tops almost all other writing tests, including CDs. It also supports 24X CD-RW, which we couldn’t test due to unavailability of the media. Altogether, it is the best you can get in this price.

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