Iomega's latest DVD burner covers the format bases well and at an attractive price point. Read our Australian review.Sony's still sitting in the high ground with its DRU-510A multiformat DVD burner, but the competition can't entirely be accused of sitting still in this space. Iomega's new Internal 4X Dual Format drive is a point in question. It doesn't do anything that the older Sony multiformat drive didn't already do, but it does it at a cheaper price point than the older drive. As always, a little competition is a very healthy thing, especially if you're a consumer looking for a multiformat drive.
As an IDE drive, there's really nothing much to say about installation of the Dual Format drive, which is handled identically to Iomega's not-much-older DVD+RW drive; what we said in that review applies equally here: Iomega provides the necessary screws and cables, along with a very slim installation booklet that guides the user through hardware installation. Software installation involves the installation of six different packages; Hotburn Pro is the main burning package, but you also get Iomega Automatic Backup for data backup, Sonic MyDVD 4 for DVD movie authoring, Sonic CinePlayer for DVD movie playback, MusicMatch Jukebox for MP3 functionality and Adobe Activeshare.
Hotburn Pro isn't our writing software of choice (we test with Ahead's excellent Nero Burning ROM) but for basic uses it's a solid enough package. As with most of Iomega's software packages, installation is handled via an onscreen application that launches when the software CD is inserted. The rest of the package covers just about everything that you'd want in a DVD-burner, save for the highly contentious issue of copying/backing up DVD movies.
As with most burners of this generation, the Dual Format burner is 4x read capable from DVD+RW and -RW discs, 2.4x write capable to DVD+RW and 2x write capable to DVD-RW. It's also a 16x CD-RW burner. That puts it solidly below the DRU-510A which is 4x DVD+RW capable, but at AU$599 it is cheaper, while retaining the same dual-format capabilities.
The dual format burner's test results were on the slower side. Filling a DVD-R disc with 4.38GB of data took 28:53, which is pretty much par for the course, but writing a 500MB test directory to DVD+RW media took 3:29, making this the slowest drive we've seen. For reference, it's even slower than Iomega's own DVD+R/RW drive reviewed here by over 30 seconds. Reading that same directory back to a hard drive took a much nippier 2:29, however, so it's not all doom and gloom for the dual format drive.
At AU$599, the Iomega Dual Format drive forces the price point of multi-faceted DVD burners even lower; quite what this will do to the price of Iomega's only recently released DVD+RW burner will be interesting to see. The Dual format drive isn't the speediest, and it doesn't offer the greatest feature set, but it does cover the major hurdle that most people pondering a DVD burner worry about; it burns to every major format save DVD-RAM, and is worthy of consideration if you're considering a DVD burner purchase.
Iomega DVD Internal 4x Dual Format Drive
Company: Iomega Australia
Price: AU$599
Distributor: Selected resellers
Phone: (02) 8223 9140
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I have been unable to burn to a DVD-R disc with this drive. Trying multiple brands of media, and even upgrading the firmware to get the advertised "increased media compatibility" didn't help any. Burns DVD+R or DVD+RW just fine.