CD Freaks has posted a review of the BenQ's new dual format DVD recorder, the DW822A. In addition to writing DVD+R media at 8x and DVD+RW media at 4x (DVD-R/-RW media is limited to 4x/2x respectively), BenQ has announced that a firmware update will be made available in the fall that will add dual layer writing support to the drive. So how does the drive stack up? Here's a snippet from the review:

We can’t get around the fact that it’s the first drive on the market that is advertised as dual layer capable (although a firmware upgrade is required), and many people will probably buy it just because of that. It does also offer 8x DVD+R writing speed and is pretty fast at writing at 8x too. Couple this with BenQ’s Walking OPC technology and the result is that it creates very good quality discs with almost all types of DVD-R and DVD+R media. The walking OPC technology does also help when writing CD-R discs, as the quality of the created CD-R discs was also outstanding. It’s also worth mentioning that the drive supports bitsetting, and it has a nice 8Mb buffer. And when it comes to reading discs it’s in its own class, few other drives are able to combine the high reading speeds and low seek times that this drive has.

The fact that it doesn’t support 8x DVD-R and 4x DVD-RW also puts it behind many other competitors. Due to the Walking OPC, it’s pretty slow at 4x DVD-R writing too, using almost 2 minutes more on a disc compared to the fastest writers. Now it’s time to look at the real problems with this drive; first of all it writes 2x DVD-RW discs at 2.4x, making them unreadable in most drives. It’s not the best choice for backing up protected music and game discs either.