Pioneer's DVR-A07 burner manages to top the field of current burners. Read our Australian review.With dual-layer burners literally just around the corner, there's some real bargains to be had in single-layer burning territory. While at least the initial run of dual layer burners will attract something of a price premium, their mere existence is putting strong pressure on single layer burners like the A07; at AU$299 it's a bargain for the moment, as long as your plans don't include dual layer burning, of course.
Physically the A07 does manage to stand out, both in and out of our test PC. The front facing adopts a panel that's somewhat larger than the DVD tray it hides, and a single button for ejecting is all you get controls-wise. There's also a miniscule activity light that we had to strain to see and a tiny eject hole beneath the unit tray (for if you can't eject any other way).
Outside of a PC, you'll also notice a honeycombed effect embedded on the burner's casing. Pioneer claims that this helps to reduce unit noise while in operation, and while we've never hit what we'd call a truly noisy burner, we'd have to admit that the A07 seemed a little quieter in operation, although that could just have been perceptual difference purely because we were, in fact, looking for exactly that.
Installation of the DVR-A07 follows the usual routine for IDE drives. Installation of the supplied software, on the other hand, will take you a while, simply because the supplied CD comes with so many individual applications to install. You get MediaChance DVD-Lab (for DVD Authoring), Pegasys TMPGEnc (video encoding, including a Dolby AC-3 encoder) and a whole raft of Ulead 'SE' products under the 'DVD Movie Factory 3 Suite' option: DVD MovieFactory 3 SE, Video Studio 7 SE, PictureShow 2 SE, Burn.Now, EasyBurner, DVD Player and Ulead's UDF Driver. As with most programs with an SE suffix, they're cut down versions of full applications intended as teasers for the full-priced versions, but there's something here for just about everybody. In our experience, however, we'd steer clear of Ulead's DVD Player software, as there are a number of better alternatives.
From a specifications viewpoint, there's only one thing that the DVR-A07D can't write to, and that's DVD-RAM, although it can read DVD-RAM discs. Otherwise, you're looking at a 24x CD-R/CD-RW burner, 4x DVD-RW/+RW burner and 8x DVD-R/+R burner. Pioneer are careful to qualify those specifications to reflect that they're only that speed capable with certified media, and indeed even at the time of writing, getting hold of certified 8x DVD-R/+R media can be a little tricky. To get you started, the unit ships with a single piece of 8x DVD-R media and a single 4x DVD-RW disc.
Like the DVR-A06, the A07 uses a crystal tilt mechanism to compensate for unusual media curvature or other physical problems, and it also supports buffer underrun protection, which should lead to fewer problems with destroying discs rather than writing to them.
In our burning tests, the A07 performed as well or better than any other 8x drive we've seen. Filling a single DVD-R disc with 4.7GB of data took 8:26, which puts it ahead of the rest of the burner field, although only by a relatively slim margin. Burning a test 383MB file to 4x DVD-RW media took 2:03; copying the same file back to our test setup took 1:20. From a re-writeable perspective, there's not a great deal between the Pioneer DVR-A07 and other similar drives, but its performance with write-once media does put it at the top of the current pack.
The model that Pioneer sells locally has its international counterparts, but Pioneer only offers warranty on 'official' units, which all bear a holographic sticker to denote their official status. Pioneer's local warranty lasts for twelve months.
Pioneer DVR-A07XL
Company: Pioneer
Price: AU$299
Distributor: Selected resellers
Phone: 1300 666 383
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