Pioneer DVR-A09XL review @ CDRLabs.com

The DVR-A09XL is, in many ways, what the DVR-A08XL should have been. While the DVR-A08XL was one of the first drives to feature 16x DVD-R and 4x DVD+RW DL writing speeds, its Z-CLV writing method kept it from being one of the faster DVD writers available at the time. As you saw in this review, that isn't the case with the DVR-A09XL. Pioneer not only remedied many of DVR-A08XL's shortcomings, they upped the ante with some of the fastest DVD±RW and DVD±R DL writing speeds available.

Like the DVR-A08XL, the DVR-A09XL can write to both DVD-R and DVD+R media at 16x. Unlike its predecessor though, it uses CAV when writing at this speed. This allowed the DVR-A09XL to write an entire 4.7GB DVD in about 6 minutes. Pioneer's new drive also also turned in some very good times when writing to DVD-RW media at 6x, but would not write to any of our 8x DVD+RW media, even with the latest firmware. The DVR-A09XL's DVD+R DL writing performance did make up for this somewhat. Thanks to its 6x writing speed, it took the drive a little more than 19 minutes to burn an entire 8.5GB DVD.