Ricoh MP7200A IDE CDR-W - Page 6

CDR Tests - Page 2

- Comparison between various recording technologies

All 4 tested CDR-W drive have different recording technologies in order to achieve the highest recording speed:

- Yamaha 2100E: supports 16x P-CAV
- PleXWriter PX-W1610A: supports 16x CLV
- Ricoh MP7200: supports 20x Zone-CLV
- Sanyo CRD-BP1500P: supports 24x Zone-CLV

Here is the most interesting graph of our test... How the various recording technologies from our 4 contestants perform and which one gives us the lower recording time? Yes i know you probably have thought of it, but let us explain:

(The above recording times for Ricoh MP7200A and Sanyo CRD-BP1500P done with 16x certified CDs. That means the real recording time with 24x certified media will be equal (or probably lower) that the one is who are posted above. Anyway, let's compare them...)

As you may have expected the Sanyo CRD-BP1500P has the lower recording time, since it is the faster among the 4 recorders. The interesting part here is that the Ricoh MP7200A is only 30 secs slower for both 74 &80min tests. In other words, Sanyo CRD-BP1500P does a full 74minutes in 3:51mins and Ricoh MP7200A in 4:24minutes. The PleXWriter PX-W1610A needs 48secs, than Ricoh MP7200A, to finish the task and as for Yamaha 2100E needs a complete extra minute (60secs) more. More or less the same time differences apply for the 80minutes CDs also...

Of course with 24x certified media, the burning times for Ricoh MP7200A, may be somewhat lower. Nevertheless these results are very close to what Ricoh posts on their webpage. Ricoh posted a tests comparison (above picture), between the MP7200A and MP7125A models, when burning a full 74min CD. The reported burning time (260secs) is very close to what (264secs) our tests (even with 16x certified media) gave back!!!

So, is there a possibility that Nero's warning about reducing the writing speed is not real? Could it be that even with 16x certified media you are finally getting the maximum writing speed? We will know for sure when we will have 24x certified media in our hands for extensive tests:

- Testing various media at 20x Z-CLV writing speed

The majority of the tested media did not seem to have any major problems writing at 20x Z-CLV writing speed. Of course we always had Nero's warning about reducing the writing speed, but the final results was pretty close to what Ricoh engineers officially posted in their website (check above for more details).

We tried to burn 5 CDs in ROW of each media at 20x writing speed (with JustLink de-activated) with Nero 5.5.1.8, in order to see the behavoir of our test media:

As we can see from our comparison tables, we had the best performance at 74min CD tests with Verbatim DataLife Plus 24x(?) - (note: We put a "?" in the media since Verbatim send us the media as 24x and the box said 16x+..) - 4:24minutes. In the 80min CD tests the Verbatim DataLife Plus 16x gave us back the same time in all burns (4:43). Since we had only one 24x certified media we did not try to compare it under real recording, but only in simulation (with JustSpeed activated), which by our suprise gave us a higher time. (!)

- Overburning Tests:
We used 90min CDs (from Medea International) and 99min CDs (from Disc4You) in order to check the drive's ability to overburn. With the CD Speed 99 overburn test we got that drive can burn up to 99mins:

Afterwards we used Nero and confirmed the above results. We managed to burn up to 99minutes of AudioCD tracks with MP7200A!

This is the first high speed recorder that supports such high recording capacities.

- AudioCD Tests
We created several Audio CDs (including CD-Text). All of the CDs we created, were tested with the Plextor PX-40TS and Plextor's CD-Text compatible CD player. From what we saw, everything worked just fine. Note that the Ricoh MP7200A CANNOT read the "CD-Text" information from CD-Text enabled Audio CDs.

- CloneCD Tests:
The Ricoh MP7200A supports DAO-RAW writing according to the CloneCD v3.0.1.1. The drive also supports "SAO-RAW" mode and simulation mode :). The CloneCD supports fully the 20x writing speed so you only have to select or just put the "max" setting...

We tried to backup protected CDs using various CD protections and our tests for "SafeDisc 1", "LaserLock" and "SecuROM 2" had completed with success.

- SD2 report:
For the SD2 tests we used the "No One Lives For Ever" CD title. We used the Ricoh MP7200A both as reader/writer. The results were ,as expected, the same we had with the previous Ricoh drives negative...:

The above test shows that the Ricoh MP7200A cannot produce SD2 working backups CDs...

- Buffer Underrun tests:
The Ricoh MP7200A supports the "JustLink" anti-coaster technology for making buffer Underrun error-free CDs. The gap length of JustLink is 2-5micro meters, which may seem high since the second generation of the "BURN-Proof" technology has 0-gap length. The drive worked fine even under heavy pressure from our side (100% CPU Usage).

- Verdict of CDR Results:
The Ricoh MP7200A is the first retail recorder which supports 20x Zone-CLV writing speed. The drive's overall performance was very good with the various CDR media and for enjoying the drive's full speed, probably you will need 20x/24x certified CDs. The drive's recording times are 50secs faster than the 16x CLV writing speed and slower 30secs than 24x Zone-CLV. Last Ricoh MP7200A has the biggest Overburning feature among the tested drives since it can write up to 99minutes!