Benq 1640 Review

This is the twin of the Plextor 740A. It's a great drive, with high quality writing, and real fast reading. Check out the review!

The main positive points: The most positive point will probably be that this drive is a very good all-rounder with almost no noticeable issues. The media compatibility is good, the writing quality is good to excellent with most media types and it offers very good reading speeds. QSuite also makes a nice addition to the drive as it offers many extra features. Overall it is one of the best – if not the best drive on the market right now. The drive also have a good cooling solution that seems to work, as it appears to operate a lot cooler than previous BenQ drives. The two new features added by firmware BSKB and later give the final touch. It supports overspeeding and in combination with SolidBurn this seems to make an excellent combination. If a disc is good enough for 16x, it will write at 16x. If not it will try next lower speed, than next speed and so on until it finds a suitable speed or the lowest writing speed is reached. A benefit of having to enable overspeeding and SolidBurn through QSuite is that newbie’s and users that do not need or want to overspeeding don’t need to worry about it as it’s disabled by default. But power users that like to experiment will have no problems enabling these features through QSuite.

The main negative points: But as usual there are some negative points that we will like to mention. First point is not a serious issue, but a surprising issue; the drive creates PIE/PIF error spikes when writing DVD+R media at 16x, as one of the main promoters of the DVD+R format we had expected the DVD+R writing to be perfect. But the error spikes don’t seem to be large enough to cause any reading issues. The OPC feature also seems to be a bit over-sensitive as some media did not write at certified speed. And like many other drives; the CD-RW writing quality is very poor and needs improving. We would also like to see support for Ritek 6x DVD-RW and MKM 8x DVD+RW media. For the MKM 8x DVD+RW media we were informed that it was not supported since it was pre-release media, so we could probably blame that problem on Mitsubishi.