Product Listing

LITE-ON SHM-165H6S Internal DVD Writer

By Vincent Chang - 17 Apr 2006

Conclusion

Conclusion

One of the surprising developments in the optical drive industry was the recent announcement by BenQ that its optical drive production unit has been acquired by LITE-ON in a strategic deal. This merger between the third and fourth largest players in the market will create a massive entity that will catapult itself instantly into second place. Considering the tight margins and competitive pressures in the industry, this consolidation makes much sense and the new company should hope to benefit from greater economics of scale.

While BenQ has been a relatively new player in the scene, it has quickly captured a sizable share of the market due to its stellar drives, which managed to be both price and feature competitive. If our impressions of the new LITE-ON SHM-165H6S drive hold true, LITE-ON certainly needs some of BenQ's engineering prowess. Not that LITE-ON makes poor drives, it's just that based on what we have seen today, the SHM-165H6S is not particularly outstanding.

It performs up to the mark for most burns, though at mediocre speeds that barely raised our heartbeats. The burn quality was for the most part, pretty decent and that could be one of its strengths. While BenQ drives have been noted for their ability to 'over-speed', that is an unofficial 'feature' missing from the LITE-ON drive, which needs to be manually enabled via their bundled utility. Its main advantage probably lies in its 'jack of all trades' card of supporting all the media formats and to top it off, it has LightScribe technology. Crucially, all these features do not make it unique but just another player in a crowded market with more add-ons to offer.

Finally, as a new drive with all the spanking tech acronyms, the LITE-ON SHM-165H6S is definitely going to cost more than the average 16x burner. Priced from between US$52 – US$60, it is a decent price for what you get. It may be more expensive than the vanilla 16x writers in the market, like BenQ's own DW1640 but the addition of DVD-RAM and LightScribe should satisfy those who need a writer to 'write them all'.

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