DVD writers have become something of a commodity item these days and you can pick up a top-of-the-range internal model for not much more than £30. However, bundled software packages can also be confusing for someone unfamiliar with how they work, and has most likely put off a fair few potential buyers. Lite-On thinks it has solved both these problems in a convenient way with the EZ-DUB external USB 2.0 DVD writer.

What makes the EZ-DUB different is the two buttons on top of the drive. The square one is labelled File and the round one Dub. It would've been clearer if the Dub button was called Copy, perhaps, but in the era of political correctness, words such as 'copy' seem to have been banished. The drive itself is rather ordinary looking for an external DVD writer. It's black and silver in colour, with USB and power connectors at the rear. A small power brick and fairly short USB 2.0 cable are supplied with the drive.

The drive inside the EZ-DUB is a Lite-On SHW-1635S. This will write to DVD±R media at 16x, DVD+RW media at 8x, DVD-RW at 6x, DVD+R dual layer at 8x and finally dual-layer DVD-Rs at 4x. It will also burn CD-Rs at 48x and CD-RWs at 24x - not quite as fast as the latest, cutting-edge drives.

To use the EZ-DUB function you still need to install some software on your PC, but this is far more basic than the software suites usually bundled with external writers. And if you want to copy - sorry, dub - a CD or DVD, it's merely a case of pressing the button on the drive - once you've set up the source drive the first time you dub a disc.

Writing files is similarly straightforward. Press the File button on the drive and up pops the EZ-DUB application window. Then it's simply a matter of dragging and dropping the files you want to write to a disc on to the application window. When you've done, press the File button a second time and the disc is written.

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