When you see a sticker on a package advertising additional features for the product with a firmware upgrade, you might tend to assume that means the upgrade is already available for download. A reader who made that assumption about a Plextor DVD writer was in for a bit of a surprise.

"I recently purchased a Plextor PX-750A DVD Writer at BestBuy," the reader wrote. "On the box was a sticker that claimed that it could do '8x DVD-R DL' with a firmware upgrade. When I got home, I went looking for the firmware upgrade and came up empty, so I contacted Plextor Tech Support. They claimed that there are no firmware upgrades available, and that they knew nothing of my sticker."

Since Plextor support professed ignorance of the sticker, the reader sent them a scan of the front of the PX-750 package. The e-mail response he got back from Plextor was decidedly churlish:

"The statement means the drive will be capable of 8x write speed on DVD-R DL disks with a downloadable firmware update when one becomes available for the drive to support 8x DVD-R DL write speeds," Plextor tech support wrote. "If the drive was shipped or was sold with the 8x DVD-R DL write speeds there would be no use for the statement. That is why the statement is on the box, so you could see that the drive as it is sold does not yet support the 8x write speeds for DVD-R DL media. We apologize if you are disappointed, however we have presented you with the facts as they stand at the moment. Again, please check our site from time to time for future firmware updates as they become available. The firmware should be available for download in the very near future."

The tone of the message was all the more infuriating since the reader felt he was perfectly justified in having interpreted the sticker to mean that the firmware was already available. "If they had just told me from the beginning that the upgrade wasn't available yet, it would have been much easier to accept," the reader wrote. "Instead, after I went to the trouble of scanning the sticker for them, their response was rude and condescending. So, is it Plextor's policy to falsify performance information about their drives, backed up by promises of upgrades? Can a hardware company really advertise on their box that a drive is capable of something, but only with a firmware update that hasn't been created yet?"

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