Pioneer make me SO angry
! Their firmware is a complete joke! When they release another one, I won't be downloading it, whether it blows my writer or not. I am so fed up with them sh*tting on companies which make good discs (Ritek for example) who make arguably the best dye for DVD-R and they rate it to 1x on my 104 which inevitably craps on the user too, God damn. You instantly know when they release a new firmware, they will rate virtually every single piece of media writable at a crap speed. Then, in aid to get you to update, they tell you something bad might happen! In some cases, it may - but not all! They reel people in and we take it (me included). That is why I took it upon myself to sit at my computer for a few days to get rid of the worst firmware EVER - 1.41, whether it wrote off the drive or not! The firmware issue is one of the things which will make me choose my next drive and i'm afraid it won't be a Pioneer - more likely a Plextor (like my CD-R/W which has NEVER let me down, nor did my old 12x one and it's still going after 4 years!)
For a firmware to be rated @ the max writable speed with Pioneer, the DVD-R company has to get up Pioneer's arseholes. If they fall out or don't give them what they want, they blacklist them and when they fall out with enough companies, they make a new 'firmware update', HA HA, and piss people off even more! We then have the endevour of having to either hack it or find a way around it and god bless those who do help to get others out of this firmware hell (Batousai for example, for the hacked UPGDVD.EXE). Without that, I would still be using 1.41 (<Spit>).
So, if Pioneer want my custom, they should bear this in mind (or at least give the paying consumer an option to downgrade THEIR property at THEIR discression. THERE IS NO DENYING THEIR DRIVES ARE GREAT, BUT I'm sure other Pioneer owners feel the same and I for one feel better about getting this off my chest... Sure, some discs are crap, but these limits should only be imposed upon the crap discs - not upon virtually all the others too...