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Appeared on: Sunday, March 31, 2002
Ricoh officially admits no +R upgrade for existing DVD+RW drives

Ricoh Japan announced on the 28th that upgrading existing DVD+RW drives in order to support DVD+R media is impossible. Ricoh will soon start selling on April 12th, the "MP5125A" that supports both DVD+R and DVD+RW media.

The upgrade is not possible due to different firmware, pickup design and LSI chipsets. Existing DVD+RW drives could support DVD+R only via hardware upgrade from certified service centers. That would cost a lot of money and wouldn't be possible for all Ricoh customers.

Our comment: That news was already known to our visitor from our reviews. Several manufacturers, including HP, kept promising DVD+R compatibility to existing DVD+RW drives, when they knew this couldn't become true. Ricoh, (the only DVD+R/RW manufacturer), had admitted: "...The present drive (5120) cannot support DVD+R. The next generation drive will support DVD+RW and DVD+R, however whether this can be done by firmware is still unknown..." as we had posted in our MP5120A review.

Some websites were participated in the "+R support with firmware upgrade" campaign. We hope next time both companies and press to be more responsible towards buyers...

More information about this subject can be found over here. Feel free to post your thoughts over our forums.


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