On another forum I use frequently someone has posted that it's not worth buying a home DVD writer at the moment as the 9 gig drives are on their way, is this true?

I currently have a BTC 4x DVDr-/+ drive, will it be possible to upgrade firmware or something to handle 9 gig disks?

Has anyone seen or can give me a link to 9 gig drives for home use as this guy failed to do so...

It's indeed true that the dual layer DVD writers are on their way. Most probably, the first models will be released within about 3 months. I don't know if you should wait for this, as there will be some issues with these new drives: they will be expensive and not mature enough (maybe a little buggy, questionnable writing quality and such, limited media supprt).
Besides that, there won't be too many different media to choose from available and most likely, the media prices will be high, while the quality won't (at first) be what we currently are used to!

A last thing that might be of a bad influence, is the lack of support in many (somewhat older) standalone DVD players.

If you want to read something about these DVD writers, be sure to use the search on the forum, and visit our mainpage, as quite some newspostings about the DL drives can be found there (and many will come I suppose)...

Am I right in thinking that dual-layer writers will only be able to utilise dual-layer media?

I can forsee dual-layer media being quite costly.

Indeed, if you want to write DL, you need special DL media!

So if we need DL drives for 9 gig media then I guess it's not going to be possible just to upgrade the firmware on my SL drive to write to those disks after all...

Ah well, suppose I can wait a while until the DL drives drop below £150 again. (coule be a while though, but at least by then they should start getting reliable)

Well.. DL burners need different hardware (laser, controller, chipset etc), but it could well be (from a technical point of view) that some manufacturers sell DL burners as SL burners are first and offer an upgrade later on. I won't count on that, but it should be possible!

I don't think it is not worth buying a DVD writer now just because Dual Layer DVD writers are coming. Nobody yet knows just how much they are going to charge for Dual Layer DVD recordable media. Philips and all the other DVD+RW Alliance companies indicate the first Dual Layer DVD+R writers will write at 2.4x speed just like the first generation DVD+RW drives first released and marketed in the second half of year 2001.

It just increases the desirability of DVD writers as it is a great application to use the added 3.8GB storage space and to copy Dual Layer pre-recorded media to Dual Layer recordable media.