CDRLabs.com has posted a review of Pioneer's popular DVR-A08XL drive. It not only offers 16x DVD±R and 4x DVD±RW writing speeds, it was one of the first drives with the ability to write to DVD+R DL media at 4x. The drive also includes features like 32x CD-R writing speeds, 40x CD read speeds and reduced operating noise, thanks to Pioneer's Quiet Drive technology. But is this enough to warrant spending your Christmas booty on? Here's a snippet:

Of course, with a drive like the DVR-A08XL, writing quality and media compatibility are just as important as speed. Unfortunately, finding DVD±R media that would work at 16x was not an easy task, even with the latest firmware. While Pioneer's new drive wrote to most of our test media at 12x, very little of it worked at 16x. On the other hand, the DVR-A08XL's writing quality was pretty good for the most part.

Unfortunately, the DVR-A08XL's bitsetting capabilities are fairly limited. While the drive automatically sets the book type to "DVD-ROM" when writing to DVD+R DL discs, it lacks the ability to do the same with single layer DVD+R and DVD+RW media.