A look at HP's DVD 640i over at CDR Labs. The drive is notable for its support of LightScribe technology. The rest of the specs are rather unimpressive, and the media compatibility is not that good.
With the dvd640i, HP has introduced one of the first LightScribe capable DVD writers. This innovative technology lets users burn graphics and text onto the tops of specially coated discs. While this will appeal to some, first generation drives like the dvd640i aren't for everyone. Designed primarily for its LightScribe capabilities, HP has had to make some sacrifices in the way of performance, keeping the dvd640i from being one of the faster DVD writers currently available.
Like the BenQ drive its based on, the dvd640i can write to DVD+R media at 16x. At this speed, the drive took a little more than 6 minutes to turn out an entire 4.7GB DVD. Unfortunately, the dvd640i wasn't nearly as fast with other types of recordable media. While the drive performed as expected, its 8x DVD-R and 2.4x DVD+R DL writing speeds put it at a disadvantage in some of our tests.
When it came to media compatibility, the dvd640i gave us some mixed results. The drive wrote to most of our test media at its rated speed, but like its BenQ counterpart, it would not write to any 8x DVD+R media at 16x. While this is becoming less of an issue as more 16x media becomes available, it's still a nice feature to have. The dvd640i's writing quality was pretty good for the most part. However, even with the latest firmware there is still room for improvement, especially with the 16x DVD+R discs from Optodisc and RiDATA.
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