Ricoh MP9060A CD-R/RW & DVD-ROM Drive - Hardware Review - Evaluation

Emedia Professional, March, 2000 by Michelle Manafy

DirectCD-created RW discs can be read on any Windows-equipped PC via the UDF reader that is automatically installed on the computer when DirectCD is installed. If DirectCD is not installed on a computer, the UDF reader will be automatically installed from the DirectCD-created disc when it is inserted in the drive.

handy with DVD, too

The drive ships with Ravisent Technologies' Software Cinemaster for DVD-Video playback. Cinemaster also features a wizard, and installed in under a minute. The DVD navigational tool does not always appear when Cinemaster is opened, but Windows users can quickly right click and find a variety of control options. The control interfaces look like remotes, which provide immediate familiarity even if one is not well-versed in the options DVD-Video provides. Once the DVD is playing, another right click reveals advanced options, including multi-angle, time search, chapter title search, and subtitles. A particularly entertaining feature is closed captioning, which comes in handy for figuring out unintelligible song lyrics.

Ricoh's timing for delivering a combination drive that relies on software decoding for its DVD playback couldn't be better. Software DVD playback has been around for a while, but until computers with Pentium II or better processors became commonplace, the performance they delivered was sorely lacking. Unfortunately, graphics cards are another matter entirely and playback performance is certainly affected by card quality. My machine is equipped with a generic ADT 4MB card, which is anything but state of the art. However, everything that the graphics card could handle ran at real-time and both the drive and software are suited for standard consumer use.

The drive offers 4X Max CAV DVD read speed (roughly 5.5MB/sec when reading fastest at the outer edge of the disc), which is irrelevant for DVD-Video applications, since DVD-Video discs are always read at the 1.375MB/sec (1X) speed set by the DVD-Video spec. The increase in speed is useful when accessing data on DVD for things like encyclopedias and for fast software loading, and I found it to be much faster and useful than its CD-ROM equivalent. There are faster DVD-ROM drives out there--Hitachi and Pioneer have released 8X and 10X drives--but the performance differences are much less than the numbers would suggest. What disparities exist in DVD drive performance at this stage owe more to the quality and effective integration of the bundled encoder (hardware or software), host system capabilities (particularly where software encoding is involved), and the quality of the graphics card used. CAV read speed is a minor concern by comparison and should not be factored heavily into DVD-ROM drive purchasing decisions.

thinking outside the toolbox

Perhaps because I'm a fan of the all-purpose tool, I'm also quite aware of its limitations. I find, however, that this is often outweighed by the benefits of convenience and gadgetry appeal. The Ricoh MP9060A adequately performs a variety of functions and the fact that it only takes up a single half-height bay, but provides the functionality of three devices, and costs little more than a standard CD-R/RW drive, will certainly appeal to many. The old adage about choosing "the right tool for the right job" does apply to the Ricoh MP9060A, but it never did take into account an overriding factor--convenience.