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 DVD±R media at 8x.

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 DVD±RW 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.