The TEAC DV-W516GB is an LiteOn OEM based drive. Similar to the 1673S drive in many respects, it is the last drive that TEAC releases on the market. It may be the last one but not the best drive ever released by TEAC. It misses a lot of important features like, DVD overburning as well as bitsetting, but it also has some good traits which we will mention further on. Many of the usual tests in our reviews have been excluded in this review, due to the fact that the drive shares the same capabilities as the 1673S LiteOn drive. For those who want a closer look at the drives capabilities that we have omitted in this review, feel free to have a look here.

The DV-W516GB is an average CD and DVD reader and a fast enough DVD ripper. It has good DVD error correction but is poor when it comes to CD. When testing the 721 ABEX test media, it reported poor results, namely 55.0 out of 100, a pretty low score and one of the lowest we've ever reported.

CD writing quality isn't one of the drives major points, since it produced only one successful burn ( "pass") from Clover Systems test. DVD writing quality at 16X is average with -R media and poor with +R media. At 8X burning speed, the drive reported good results, and this is the speed recommended for quality burns with the TEAC 516GB drive. The RW burns are not bad at all, since the drive managed to produce a very good burn at 8X burning speed with +RW media.

As for the extra features which most end users like to see in a drive, the TEAC will leave them with a taste of disappointment as DVD overburning isn't included in the drive's capabilities and BookType setting isn't supported by any of the well known utilities which we used with the 516GB.

It's price ranges from US$58 to US$70 including VAT.

- The Good

• Good DVD error correction
• Supports protected Audio discs (CDS200, Key2Audio)
• Can overburn up to 99mins
• Region free utilities

- The Bad

• Doesn't accurately backup SafeDisc2 v2.9x+ protected discs
• Poor Single Layer media writing quality at 16X
• Doesn't support DVD overburning

- Like to be fixed

• DVD writing quality at 16X mostly
• Better CD error correction

Retail Package
Reading
Error Correction
Protected Discs
Writing
Features