Hardware
Review of: |
 In
the spring of 2000, I had a little money burning in my pockets and got
to the point where I just had to have a CD-Burner. As is my habit, I shopped
on-line and offline until I dropped. I studied the options but couldn’t
make up my mind. Then my good friend Ted Lawson put me on to the Ricoh
MP 9060A. He’s a hardware man and when he likes a product, I listen.
What caught my eye (and pocketbook) is that this is not just a CD-Burner. It is a CD/CDR/CDRW/DVD drive that does it all! It was the last part, DVD, that hooked me. I knew I was going to need a DVD drive and thought it mighty handy that Ricoh had combined it with a CDR/CDRW drive. Not that it was much of a money saver. I paid about $265 for the drive last May, which was the same price that a CDR/ CDRW and a DVD drive would cost if purchased separately (Shortly thereafter the Ricoh dropped to $225). It was the convenience of having all that flexibility on one drive, taking up only one slot on my case that appealed to me. Since then, others have copied Ricoh in combining drives, but they got there first. My drive has worked well. My only complaint is that it will only burn CDs at 2X, although it has 6X capability. As just mentioned, the CDRW part is supposed to work at 6X. The CD is 24X and the DVD is 4X. Both of these are plenty fast enough. Some authorities think anything over a 24X CD is superfluous, and the DVD lets me watch movies. Well, what else do you say about a drive such as this? Oh yes, it is packaged with either Nero or Adaptec’s Easy CD Creator. Both are excellent. Then there is the matter of the DVD software. Ricoh bundles Ravisent Technologies’ Software CineMaster DVD movie player program. Since I bought my Ricoh, they have discontinued this model (wouldn’t you know it?). But this is not bad, really. Indeed, Ricoh has improved their offering with the MP9120A. It is a bit faster. The DVD is 8X, while the CD runs at 32X. It writes at 12X and rewrites at 10X (I’ll believe it when I see it!). It comes packaged with Prassi’s PrimoCD Plus, which is simple to use but does not have a file explorer included, so that you have to use Windows Explorer if you want to drag and drop files into your CD. Methinks most folks will purchase another software package separately! The DVD software included for the MP9120A is WinDVD 2000 by InterVideo.
If you shop online you can find the Ricoh MP9120A at the Ricoh Website for $300. I searched around and found it elsewhere for about $250.
Tim Hoke is a long-time member of Alamo PC, serving on the board of directors as secretary, program chairman, president, and presently product review coordinator. He is very enthusiastic about all the new computer technology, especially CD-Burners |