DVD/CD WRITER: Nu DVD +RW DDW-081

When DVD writers entered the market, their cost was in the range of Rs 15,000 to 25,000. Now their prices have really crashed, and here's a model that costs around Rs 5000. The Nu DVD writer is based on Philips' new Nexperia platform, and can write/rewrite only DVD+R/RWs at 8X/4X speeds, and read at 12X. Its CD-writing/rewriting capabilities are 40X/10X.

 We received a 4X DVD+RW media with the drive, and since 8X media is still hard to find in the market, we were forced to restrict our tests to 4X media. The test results were good, except for when we tried to copy large files (more than 700 MB) to the DVD+RW media in burst mode using Nero InCD. It had no problems copying small files, and managed to copy 4.2 GB

of data in about 30 mins. On the other hand, we didn't face any issues due to large file sizes when burning the data on the DVD+R media, and it only took 14 mins and 43 secs. This timing is likely to be lower with 8X media. On the CD-writing front, it took 4 mins to burn 650 MB of data from the hard drive to CD. 

The bottom line: A good buy if you don't plan to do burst copies of large files on RW media. 

Anindya Roy