Ricoh MP9060 6x4x24 CDRW & 4x DVD-Rom

Rating:
Summary: A great value?
Review: Great if you have a limited number of drive bays. I found the 4x DVD drive to be a little slow, and there were occasional pauses during playback of The Matrix. The writing capabilities of this drive are amazing! I upgraded from a 2x CDRW drive and I'll say that this one blows the pants off of it. But for $299, you can probably find a faster DVD drive and an equivalent CDRW drive for about the same price.

Rating:
Summary: Burn the player not the CD
Review: I bought this combo CDRW/DVD player a couple of years ago and it has perform horribly. It's been a major headache since then. When I first install the CDRW/DVD player, it already had problems playing DVDs. At first, I thought it was my DVDs but when I play them on a DVD console it played them fine.
This Ricoh CDRW/DVD player "hick-ups" alot about 30 minutes into the movie. You can hear a distintive "grinding" noise from the motor to have the lazer head to re-read the skip track on DVD. The motor will spin 3 times to attempt continuous play and then gives up and stop all playback. Also, I notice that new DVDs have a copper underface compared to the older silver underface. These new DVDs do NOT work at all this MP9060 player. It has a hard time reading the disk all the time and will skip continuously. Call customer service did not help me at all and they have not called me back regarding how to solve the problem.
As a CDRW, it performs unsatisfactory but it will burn CDs if you are willing to buy alot of them to make one CD.
Save your money and go with another brand. I will never buy any Ricoh products ever.

Rating:
Summary: All-In-One Device... Great Value for the Average User
Review: If you've been waiting for CDs to be replaced by DVDs, and are starting to become a bit impatient 'cos it doesn't seem to be happening, this unit maybe just what you'll need right now during this painfully slow transition period.

CD writing ability of this drive is generally fairly good, although I did find that there was one particular major brand of CD-R which caused the drive to almost hang up, and was unable to make any sort of successful recordings on it. Otherwise, the qualities of the recordings were very consistent. However, older drives might have problems in reading CDs created by this drive. One other problem detected was the inconsistencies between the size of files to be recorded (as reported by the bundled software) and the actual size of the recordings made, which means quite often you'll find that you're unable to pack in all the files you originally planned.

DVD reading is adequate and satisfactory. As usual, the quality DVD video playback will be greatly enhanced if accompanied by a decent graphics card and/or hardware decoder. The speed of the drive should be sufficient for any DVD videos, and if there are any pauses during playback (which there weren't many at all), it is probably due to the quality of the laser pickup.

To summarise, there is nothing exciting or outstanding about this unit, but its major selling point is that it is extremely good-value for what it does, and also saves a lot of space. Be warned that the unit does heat up quite a bit while it is on (even when it's not actually recording!), although I don't think that should cause any problems. And like most multi-function-in-one devices, don't expect it will last very long.

Rating:
Summary: Good Value for the Price.
Review: If your computer beats the minimum system requirenments, you will have no problems with your DVD. The write and rewrite options work good, no bad cd's so far. For the current price, you can pretty much get the same value. This drive is optimal if you have limited bays, or just don't want to buy seperate drives. Over all, this is a good value. Works fine with the right pc. Even though, I don't suggest buying this just for watching movies or just for making cd's.