BIOS: Technology Means Business

Driven by the convergence of computer and consumer electronics applications, DVD recorders are now a cost-effective medium for home entertainment, PC applications and business storage requirements. While the prices of CD recordable drives have continually fallen for years, it's amazing to think that you can now get a DVD recorder that can write to all the major DVD formats (except DVD-RAM) for around £100 - allowing you to edit movies from tapes to DVD discs and then view them in most modern DVD-ROM drives and regular DVD players. Ricoh's MP5308D is a solid, if slightly over-priced offering, especially as Plextor is set to lead the numbers game with its second DVD±RW drive, the PX-712A (£119) - an internal E-IDE dual format drive that has a maximum claimed write speed of 12X, which should be fast enough to write an entire DVD disc in just six minutes. Also, if you're in the market for a DVD recorder, you may want to bear in mind that the next-generation of double-layer DVD burners are on the way. These new drives will write up to 8.5GB (4 hours of DVD-quality video) onto special DVD+R DL media.

Pros: Good software bundle; solid write-once performance
Cons: No headphone port, skip buttons or volume dial; slow re-writes

Ricoh is one of the first to market with a dual-format drive that can write to DVD±R media at up to 8-speed and DVD±RW media at up to 4-speed. In real-world terms, this means you can copy a 4.7GB DVD disc in approximately 10 minutes. Besides the speed benefits, the MP5308D can write to DVD+RW, DVD-RW, DVD+R, DVD-R, CD-R and CD-RW media, as well as read DVD-ROM, DVD+RW, DVD-RW, DVD+R, DVD-R, CD-ROM, CD-R and CD-RW discs, so compatibility with all the major current standards is assured.

In terms of design, the beige MP5308D (148x190x42mm; 1.02kg) couldn't be more bland. Along with the motorised disc tray, the front bezel simply offers an eject button, an emergency eject hole (used if discs get stuck) and a green activity LED. There's no surprises at the rear of the device either, where you'll find jumper settings (for connecting the drive as either a master or slave device), analogue and digital (S/PDIF) connectors, as well as power and data cable ports. The drive can be mounted horizontally or vertically, but Ricoh doesn't provide a S/PDIF cable or mounting brackets. You do, however, get an E-IDE data cable (for connecting to your motherboard), an analogue audio cable (for connecting to your soundcard), four mounting screws, a rather brief paper-based quick start guide and a brand-new 8-speed DVD+R disc.

The drive incorporates what Ricoh calls a 'VR function', which is the ability to add, edit and delete data from a disc and still maintain compatibility with regular consumer DVD-Video players and DVD-ROM drives - a welcome addition considering how confusing DVD standards can be. The MP5308D also features 'Lossless Linking' technology, which helps to maintain high compatibility, even when data is added or edited from a disc.

Technical specifications of the drive are current with high-end drives from other manufacturers - apart from Plextor's forthcoming PX-712A - including the ability to write DVD-R/+R media at up to 8-speed, DVD-RW/+RW media at up to 4-speed, CD-R media at up to 32-speed and CD-RW media at up to 16-speed. CD-ROM discs are read up to 40-speed, which is more than adequate. The drive also comes with a 2MB buffer, access times of 140ms (DVDs) and 120ms (CDs), and buffer underrun protection.

Ricoh bundles a good range of software with the drive, comprising Ahead Software's Nero Burning ROM 6.0 (CD and DVD authoring package), Express 2.0 (basic authoring tools) Vision Express 2 (entry-level video editor), BackIT Up (backup software), Showtime (DVD-Video playback software) and InCD 4 (for writing to CD-RW and DVD-RW media just like a hard disk). However, as the software is an OEM bundle (produced by Ahead Software but distributed under Ricoh's brand), there's no paper-based manuals or quick-start guides provided.

In testing, the MP5308D managed to achieved its claimed data transfer rates, although data transfer rates were not consistent. For instance, although the drive writes to DVD-RW media at a claimed rate of 4-speed, it actually wrote to media at a rate of around 1-speed (1.4MB/s) using a Verbatim disc. Of course, the actual speed will vary depending on the quality of the media you use. Write-once performance was more impressive, and we managed to rip an whole DVD+ disc (4.43GB file) in just over 10 minutes. As expected, the performance of DVD+R recording using the 8-speed disc supplied is almost twice as fast as that of DVD-R authoring using 4-speed media.

Links:
MP5308D performance results
MP5308D Web site

About our tests:
BIOS uses Roxio's Creator 7.0 software to copy files to CD and DVD media, as well as to format discs. We use media supplied by the vendor, or media supplied by Verbatim. For testing, we use two types of mixed files for our CD and DVD tests, due to the relatively limited storage capacity of CDs. For DVD tests we copy a single 4.43GB file (3,603 files in 107 folders) consisting of MP3 and WMA tracks, JPEG, TIFF, PSD, PDF and Zip files, program files and HTML pages. For the CD tests we copy a single 649MB file (2,520 files in 24 folders) consisting of MP3 and WMA tracks, JPEG, TIFF, PSD, PDF and Zip files, program files and HTML pages. Our format test shows you how long the drive takes to completely erase all data on a disc.