Ricoh will apparently display some DVD+R DL technology at CeBIT 2004.
I guess this is to compete with Sony's announcement yesterday of their DL drives.

Ricoh Corporation announced o­n the 18th that they will have a DVD+R "DVD+R DL" dual layer drive and media by this summer. Also, they will have a 16x DVD+R, and 8x DVD+RW product within the end of the year. This technology will be o­n display at the CeBIT exposition in Germany's Hannover.

"DVD+R DL" is a dual layered DVD+R disc with a capacity of 8.5GB, announced in October of last year. It can fit around 4 hours of DVD quality video. Also, it has maintained the compatibility with current DVD players and DVD-ROM drives.

As for the 16x DVD+R and 8x DVD+RW, this is two times the speed of current drives. The announcement that standardization was made at CeBIT. This 16x speed will record 4.7GB of data in under 6 minutes, and the 8x speed will record it in under 8 minutes.

Inspired by:
http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/av/docs/20040318/ricoh.htm

Press Release:
http://www.ricoh.co.jp/release/by_field/cd_dvd/2004/0318.html