Lite-On won our group test of DVD writers back in December (page 91), but as so often happens with DVD drives, it’s been superseded by new models which offer incremental speed increases. However, Lite-On adds something new to the mix with its new range. These three are all essentially the same drive – the SHW-160P6S02C is the base drive and supports 16x DVD+R and 16x DVD-R burning, 8x DVD+RW and 6x DVD-RW rewriting, 8x DVD+R9 and 4x DVD-R9 dual-layer burning as well as 48x CD writing and 24x CD rewriting. In short, on paper it’s one of the fastest on the market.

The SHM-165P6S02C is the same but also supports 5x DVD-RAM. The SHM-165H6S is the same as the SHM-165P6S02C but adds LightScribe to the mix – making it the fastest, most fully-featured drive that we’ve seen. Newell Computers offer the two lower-end drives as OEM models meaning you get the drive and nothing else. However, the top-end SHM-165H6S comes with a full retail bundle of beige, silver and black bezel options, CyberLink PowerDVD 5 and Nero.

In our CD/DVDSpeed tests (www.cdspeed2000.com) in the key formats (discs don’t exists for bleeding edge format/speed combinations like 6x DVD-R9 yet so we couldn’t test) performed well. With DVD+R the CAV writing only reached maximum 16x speed (1x = 1350KB/s) at the end meaning it averaged 11.9x to write a full 4.7GB – just over five minutes. Our 8x dual-layer DVD+R9 disc wrote at an average of 6.7x meaning it took only nine minutes to write 8.5GB. With the rewritable format our 12x disc convinced the drive to write at 12x CAV giving an average speed of 9.1x – six and a half minutes for 4.7GB. All other formats followed suit. Though note that 5x DVD-RAM writes at 2.5x because each packet is verified after creation.

The obvious choice of the three is the premiere SHM-165H6S. At $76 you get the retail extras, very fast speeds, all-format support plus LightScribe to burn labels with. Previously the latter has come with expensive and slow drives. It’s well worth $76 of anyone’s money and totally deserves its place on the A List.