Asus DRW-1612BL

Even as the battle between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD unfolds as to who will emerge as the leading standard, companies such as Asus, Benq, Pioneer and Liteon have kept up a steady stream of plain-jane DVD writer releases that keep improving on existing features and adding minor speed bumps. One such device is the Asus DRW-1612BL Lightscribe drive which is the focus of our review today.

The box-packed Asus DRW-1612BL is quite bare. The included accessories are 4-drive mount screws, a software installation guide, Nero OEM suite and a leather disc carrying case.

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Specification Table

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As you can see from the specification table, the Asus writer comes fully loaded. Not only does it have a full 16x support for DVD-R and DVD+R, it has 8x support for dual-layer DVD writing in both -R and +R formats and in a great move has 12x support for DVD-RAM. It also supports Lightscribe out of the box which is a process where specially made recordable CD and DVD media can be labeled using a LightScribe DVD recorder.
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We tested the drive with a variety of media using Nero 7.5.9.0. The products we used were Moser Baer 16x DVD-RW, Moser Baer 16x DVD+R and Ridata 8x DL DVD+R. For our re-writing tests we used 4x media DVD+RW from Moser Baer. Though the drive supports 8x rewrites for the+RW format, we were unable to obtain media that could be run at that speed. We also ran into a problem with our RAM media tests. We were able to obtain only a couple of Maxell 12X DVD RAM blank discs after a hunt that involved calling up virtually most of the vendors that we are familiar with

Here are the results we got from our tests.

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