Take the ultimate DVD drive and remove one feature. Now up the speed. Now drop the price.

It may be early days for the technology, but it's still interesting to look at Sony's Blu-Ray drive under the microscope.

The first Blu-ray drive to actually BE available in Australia. The massive price should fall quickly.

Always the enthusiasts favourite optical drive, Lite-On delivers as expected with its new range.

One new drive, three subtle variations, all the optical drive you'll want from the current generation.

As DVD starts gaining ground on CD burning as the optical storage method of choice, 4.7GB DVD has some competition at the hands of the newer 8.5GB dual layer format.

Although lacking the additional functions of some of the more expensive burners such as the ability to write at the faster 16-speed, burn DVD-RAM or pack 8.5GB onto a single dual layer disc - what the Optorite does is provide all the basic DVD plus and minus burning you’re likely to need without having to fork over a sizable fistful of cash to do it.

Much more efficient at reading CDs than writing them, Optorite took second place in our read tests, pipped by the Imation by a mere three seconds.

The most expensive DVD burner we received, it makes sense it would also be the best featured.

Like Samsung, Aopen’s trump card is their ridiculously low price; a CD writer at $49 is pretty hard to beat.

The Mitsubishi Electric Diamond Digital DVDXRW1248-069 was the clear winner out of all of the DVD burners we tested in this roundup. It had the performance, the features, and the value for money to easily stand out.

Second most expensive, Ricoh’s MP5316DA burner really has something to crow about, packing all the major DVD standards in DVD+/-RW support as well as dual layer functionality.

A little slower than its 12x and 16x counterparts, this is another DVD-RAM supportive drive and it ships with three RAM discs and a copy of Nero Express to have you up and burning right out of the box.

Like the ASUS CRW5232AS, the Imation drive is slightly shorter than standard full length optical drives by approximately an inch, making it ideal for small form factor cases.

Samsung’s claim to fame with this drive is it’s slightly above average value for money score; priced at just $199 it represents good value and was only beaten by both award winners the Mitsubishi and Optorite for cost.

Strongest in the performance stakes, this drive managed to take fourth place for burn speed and second place for disc read time.

One of the plainer drives, it lacks a front audio adjustment dial or headphone socket, but does deliver on fast CD writing without too much damage to your wallet.

DVD burning has been around for some time now and became widely accepted for its superior storage capacity over its little brother the CD. While we see single layer formatted 4.7GB discs now getting into the 12-speed writing range, the real action is dual-layer burning.

This unit plays more than just your rental movies and existing DVD discs, it's also capable of VBR MP3, WMA, JPEG, PhotoCD, HDCD Xvid, AVI, MPEG layers 1, 2, and 4 play, the latter of which is more commonly referred to as DivX, named after the compression codec.

After conducting our DVD burner labs last month and seeing the emergence of cheap high-speed single format drives such as the Labs winning Ricoh and BenQ models at a mere $299, it's hard to go back to the $499 price tag of the Iomega drive.