Mitsubishi's latest DVD burner offers solid burning performance at a very tasty price. Read our Australian review.

Only a short twelve months ago, Sony owned the multiformat burner market, and it was hard even then to actually find one to purchase in retail. Cut to today, however, and the market bulges with a plethora of offerings from many makers, and that means only one thing at the consumer level. Prices have tumbled, and the latest drive to hit our labs with only a soft hit to your wallet is the Mitsubishi Diamond Data DVDXRW424. At AU$279, it's the cheapest multiformat DVD burner we've seen to date.

As the unit that arrived at our labs was clearly a demonstration unit in plain packaging, it's a little tricky to assess the unit's packaging or ease of installation, but there are few surprises in store on the hardware installation front; it's just like any other IDE drive. The front faceplate is in a standard beige, with eject and play buttons, as well as a volume dial and standard earphone socket on the left hand side of the drive.

While hardware installation was simple, we were somewhat annoyed with the specifics of installing the supplied software bundle. Mitsubishi ships InCD, Sonic MyDVD, Cyberlink PowerDVD and Nero Burning Rom 5.5.10.52, but it's a customised OEM version of Nero. It warns you on the CD that it'll only work with the Mitsubishi drive. What it doesn't mention is that it overwrites other versions of Nero, and that it won't recognise other suitable CD and DVD writers on the same machine. So if you've got an additional burner (as our test machine did), you wouldn't be able to use it for multi-disc copying, at least with the supplied version of Nero. Cross-testing with NTI CD Maker showed the existence of the Mitsubishi drive, but that package wouldn't write to it for some reason. It's certainly possible that later full versions of Nero and other writing packages may pick the Mitsubishi drive (and others) properly, but in the meantime this is a reasonably serious problem for anyone with a multi-drive system.

From a specifications viewpoint, the Diamond Data DVDXRW424 is capable of writing to CDs at 24x, CD-RW at 10x, DVD-/+R at 4x, DVD+RW at 2.4x and DVD-RW at 2x, which puts it behind slightly faster offerings from Sony and Plextor, but still solidly in the race. It comes with a solid 8MB buffer and is one of the few drives we've seen where the manufacturer explicitly states that it's suitable for vertical mounting, although the notes do state that it's not suitable for burning 8cm discs in vertical orientation. It's stated for compatibility only with Windows systems from Windows 98SE upwards.

Mitsubishi rates the Diamond Data DVDXRW424 at capable of up to 3.32MB/Sec when writing to DVD+RW media (slightly less to -RW), and to our great surprise, that was exactly what it delivered in our testing, writing a full DVD+RW at exactly 3.32MB/Sec. It's quite normal to see at least a small drop in performance against manufacturer's figures, and it's nice to be surprised when a product does live up to the hype. Burning test files to +RW media saw the DVDXRW424 take 2:17 to burn a 383MB file and 1:15 to write the same file back to the test system's hard drive. Putting those figures up against comparable drives shows the DVDXRW424 to be of average writing speed but quite exceptional reading speed with this type of media.

We can't imagine that Mitsubishi will hold the lowest price point for terribly long, and if other drives do start to tumble to around this price point they'll be more compelling buys. As it stands, however, the Diamond Data DVDXRW424 is a very solid offering for anyone looking for a single burner solution. Given the problems we encountered with its specific version of Nero, however, we can't recommend it to multi-burner users.

Mitsubishi Diamond Data DVDXRW424
Company: Mitsubishi Electric Australia
Price: AU$279
Distributor: Selected resellers
Phone: (02) 9684 7777

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