One of only two DVD burners this month to come with a two year manufacturer warranty, the BenQ DW400A offers peace of mind should things go pear shaped. Although being supportive only of the DVD+R/RW packet writing standard, it features an 8MB buffer underrun cache to avoid those nasty times during a burn when your drive is unable to supply a constant data supply to the media, causing errors in the writing and subsequent reading of the disc.

Another Mt. Rainier (EasyWrite) supportive drive, once implemented, will allow usage of the DVD media as a floppy disc for click and drag file editing and burning, giving even the most inexperienced burner control over the data they wish to retain and dispose of.
Included with the drive is a pair of DVD media, a single DVD+R and RW disc ready to be written to with the supplied Nero 5.5 and InCD packet writing software, while DVD playback comes courtesy of WinCinema.

Audio connectivity via a headphone output jack allows you to plug in a set of speakers or earphones and use the DVD drive as a CD-ROM for audio playback, one of only three drives we received to support the function. Returning good performance scores, it hovered around the middle of the pack, with DVD+R write times around the seven minute mark and data extraction taking just over five minutes to copy a full 2GB contiguous image. DVD+RW write times were impressive, scoring speeds in the Pioneer and LaCie league, both of which are considerably more expensive than this drive. Value rating was a whopping 44 percent above average, due obviously to its rock-bottom price of $299, sharing this honour with the Ricoh MP5240A Labs Winning DVD burner.

While not a huge bundle in the software department when directly compared with either the Labs Winning Ricoh or more expensive Sony external DRX-510UL, it does offer plenty of out of the box functionality. We think this is a well-priced DVD burner leaving you plenty of spare cash to purchase additional software if you wish.