CDRLabs.com has done a review of NEC's popular ND-3500A DVD writer. Capable of writing up to 16x on DVD+R and DVD-R media, 4x on DVD+RW and DVD-RW media, 4x on DVD+R DL media, 48x on CD-R media, and 24x on CD-RW media, the NEC drive was one of the first of the 4x DL drives and one of the more acclaimed. Is it worth asking Santa for? What did the guys at CDRLabs think of it? Here's a snippet:

Since its introduction, the ND-3500A has been the topic of many discussions here at CDRLabs. After having the retail version of the drive in the 'Lab for a few weeks, it's easy to see why. While affordably priced, the ND-3500A offers a good number of features as well as some of the fastest DVD reading and writing speeds available.

Without a doubt, what the ND-3500A does best is write DVD's. Thanks to its 16x DVD+R and DVD-R writing speeds, it took the drive about 5 and a half minutes to write 4GB of data. This is pretty impressive considering ASUS's new 16x DVD±RW took almost a minute longer to complete our tests. This level of performance carried over to our rewriting tests where NEC's new drive turned in some very good times with both DVD+RW and DVD-RW media. The ND-3500A didn't disappoint when writing to double layer DVD+R media either. The drive lead the way, taking less than 27 minutes to burn an entire 8.5GB DVD.