While I was killing some time this morning I swung by CompUSA where I saw that they had the I/O Magic 4x +-R/RW DVD burner on sale for an incredible price: $139 after a $30 mail-in rebate (until Sept 4). After my experience yesterday in Fry’s I figured “why not” and went ahead and picked it up, not knowing really how good the drive was. My thought was that I’d go home, do some research and see if it was decent or not before opening it.

After some checking around on VCDHelp, no one had any real complaints (the only advice was to upgrade the firmware), so I decided to dive in a plop the sucker in. I’m happy to report that I’ve had no problems at all - I created a DVD+R data disk, my other DVD drive read it back no problem. Going for broke, I went ahead and made a movie of a recent hike - and my standalone DVD player played that fine as well. So all in all, for $139, im a happy guy.

Now, I just need to get some decent software. Although the drive comes with Pinnacle Instant DVD and Expression, I’d like to get something that makes the videos look a bit more “professional”. I’m going to have to check out DVDLab (which both Brian Johnson and Richard Tallent recommend).