well the thing is that philips/benQ are sick at this stuff.

if i had the choice i'd only buy drives made by that alliance as BenQ has the facilities for making the drives, and Philips being one of the main pushers of the +R group has the chip technologies needed for a drive.

another selling point is since the philips drives usually feature the same hardware as the benQ's-- BUT they dont want to include -R support.. meaning they drop in price so fast that you can just buy one and reflash it to a more expensive drive.

so in the end i end up with what is probably the most updated and compatible DVD+-RW(DL) drives for the price of an entry level +RW(DL) drive-- the BenQ1620 (some say it's better than even their most recent offerings, so i'm goign to be keeping this one for a while)