Introduction

If you're still fresh from the hustle and bustle of the recent I.T Show 2004, you'll most probably remember the multitude of consumer notebooks, printers and digital cameras being flaunted by the who's WHO of the I.T industry. While these vendors are battling for your attention and your dollars, a silent yet aggressive price war of DVD-Writers was actually taking place in the back lanes of the show. In fact, before the show was opened to the public, a whole mob of hopefuls spent hours in lines outside the exhibition hall just to ensure they can get in on this too good to miss deal. Clearly, this must be an indication of how well received DVD storage technology is with consumers nowadays.


Missing out on all these action in the show was the AOpen DRW8800/AAN. The drive belongs to the current 88s class of DVD-Writer. This means that the writer is capable of writing DVD±R and DVD±RW media at 8x and 4x respectively. To meet the demands of consumers, most vendors release just one '88' product , but in the case of AOpen, they have decided to do it otherwise. Instead of releasing just one model, the Taiwan based company is actually releasing two models based on this speed factor, namely the DRW8800/AAN and DRW8800/APP. The primary difference between the two is the DRW8800/APP's faster 16x DVD read speed, a slightly longer chassis and the ability to read DVD-RAM. For today, we'll only be touching on the DRW8800/AAN version.