At least for Europe, BenQ is history: Sunday, 10 September 2006 BenQ has announced that the company will withdraw from the optical recording market in Europe. This is extremely bad news as BenQ has recently delivered very good drives in terms of features and quality, combined with a consumer friendly price. While bailing out from the European DVD-R market they also flush their Blu-ray drive down the toiled and it will never see the market. Translation by Google: Parallel to the new announcements to LiteOn BenQ communicated that one will withdraw oneself until further notice at least into Europe from the business with optical drive assemblies. The last DVD burner, which is sold under the label BenQ, is the DW-1670. The Blu ray burner planned first will appear no more. Support and warranty, inclusive firmware updates are however further ensured for past customers, since BenQ on other markets will offer further drive assemblies. As reason BenQ Germany indicated the extremely small profit margins in the range of optical data storage. BenQ had entered only 2003 by a Joint venture with Philips into the market of the DVD burners and in relatively short time a name with qualitatively high-quality DVD burners had made themselves.
with the Benq DW1650 being a rare beast now i'm digging up a few Benq threads to shout out to any UK readers that PC World are still selling these drives, but now at £25, so i bought 2 today to keep unopened as spare drives. get them while you can i say..
