Labs

LiteOn's LH-20A1H may not be the cheapest DVD writer in our group, but it's still affordable at £28. It comes bundled with a copy of Nero Recode so you can fit a two-layer DVD movie on to a cheaper single-layer disc.

The LH-20A1H was consistently fast in our tests. It wrote single-layer DVDs at around 10X and burned double-layer discs at around 6X. It was the joint second-fastest internal DVD writer when writing DVD+RW discs, with a speed of 6.96X. It was also quick to write CD-R discs, with a speed of 28.54X. Although it wasn't the quickest writer in any of our tests, it was consistently among the fastest DVD burners in each one.

The LH-20A1H strikes the right balance between price, bundled software and consistently fast DVD-writing performance. Unless you need the best possible performance for a particular type of disc, it's a good buy, but Samsung's Super-WriteMaster is almost as quick and cheaper.