Hardware Zone has posted a review of BenQ's new 16x DVD writer, the DW1600. With 8x drives still relatively new and 12x and Dual layer drives just hitting the market, is this drive worth your money? Here's a snippet from their review:

In terms of writing to DVD+R DL disc (MCC media), both the write time clocked by SONY and BenQ were within seconds of each other with the BenQ drive ahead by just a negligible three seconds. At the moment, writing to DVD+R DL media is still a slow process and even though the storage envelope is double of what a standard DVD+R offers, media scarcity and pricing will severely hamper the adoption of this format.

Focusing our eyes on DVD+R is our first official 16x write time and it sure lived up to the months of hype and expectations surrounding this write speed clocking in at a quick 6:16 minutes. In terms of write time gain, 16x is a good 17% and 30% faster than 12x and 8x DVD write speeds respectively, making high volume data archiving a breeze.

Since 16x media are hardly available in the market now, BenQ told us that the drive should have good OverDrive burning capabilities and in fact, given us a list of 8x DVD+R media that are compatible with the DW1600.