| CDRLabs.com has posted another in-depth review, this time of Pioneer's 
"enhanced" new DVD writer, the DVR-A07XLA.  How does it stack up to its non-enhanced little brother, the DVR-A07?  Here's a snippet:
Without a doubt, what the DVR-A07XL does best is write DVD's. Thanks to its 8x DVD+R and DVD-R writing speeds, it was able to write 4GB of data in less than 8 minutes. While this is pretty impressive, Pioneer's new drive could probably be faster. For whatever reason, it took longer than normal to complete its calibration tests, adding as much as a minute to the total writing time. If Pioneer could reduce or eliminate the time it takes to do this, without sacrificing writing quality, the DVR-A07XL would be one of the fastest 8x DVD writers around. Also keep in mind that the DVR-A07XL cannot write to 4x DVDR media at 8x. 
You can read the entire review over at the CDRLabs.com web site.
 The DVR-A07XL also performed well in our DVD read tests. While its seek times were higher than I would have liked, the drive was able to read single layer, data DVD-ROM's at 12x and DVD-R/RW and DVD+R/RW media at a respectable 8x. Unlike the other Pioneer based drives we've reviewed, the DVR-A07XL was also very fast when reading DVD movies. In our tests, it was able to read single layer DVD-Video discs at a blazing 12x!
 
 Regretfully, performance and features like this don't come cheap. The DVR-A07XL currently goes for about $190 at places like Best Buy, making it one of the more more expensive 8x DVDRW drives currently available. Of course, if you can go without the fancy bezel and noise reducing technologies, the retail DVR-A07 (non XL) or OEM DVR-107D can be picked up for considerably less.
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