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The drive that Teac sent me is a very early sample, so much so that I couldn’t find any retailers selling it yet. Teac gave me an estimated price of £99 for the retail bundle, and in the absence of any vendors carrying it, that’s the price I’ve had to base this review on.

Again, because this was an early sample Teac couldn’t send me the retail package, but I was told that the retail bundle will include – an IDE cable, one blank DVD+RW disc and a suite of Nero applications – a pretty standard retail package all in all.

Looking at the drive you can see that it’s very similar to the Sony, in that it’s a very short unit. This makes it an attractive prospect for anyone building a small form factor PC where space is paramount. However, unlike the Sony, the Teac has both a headphone socket and a volume wheel for listening to CDs directly. Unfortunately there is no play/skip button which reduces the usefulness of these features. The remaining features on the fascia are an eject button, an indicator light and a manual eject hole.

Like most of the latest generation drives available, the Teac will burn DVD-R/+R at eight-speed and DVD-RW/+RW at four-speed. But with CD writing it’s a cut above, along with the Sony and MSI units. Here the Teac sports 40-speed writing for CD-R media and 24-speed writing for CD-RW discs.

When testing with DVD-R media the Teac placed second from bottom with only the Sony drive below it, while with DVD-RW media the Teac was found at the bottom on all but one test. Using DVD+R media was a different story with the Teac placing second in two out of three tests. With DVD+RW though, the DV-W85G ranged from middle of the pack to second from bottom next to the Sony again. But with CD-R media, the Teac topped the chart in both tests, and it grabbed third position in both the CD-RW tests too.

The Teac and Sony are obviously related since they seem to share the same strengths and weaknesses. The CD-R performance is identical and they both turned in very slow times for the DVD+RW format.

When it comes down to it there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with the Teac DV-W58G despite its sometimes lacklustre performance. In fact it still managed an total test time lower than the LG, but then you have to remember that the LG has so many other strings to its bow, with the most significant being a £24 price advantage. Of course it’s possible that the Teac may end up with a far more competitive street price once it launches properly, but as it stands it’s outclassed on performance and price.

Verdict

A potentially interesting drive not least because of its small dimensions. Unfortunately the high price and mediocre performance put it out of the running in this race.

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