Ho-hum
Pros:
ATSC tuner, DVR user interface, DVD-Video recording.
Cons:
Unfriendly front panel, ATSC tuner low sensitivity, unreliable.
The Bottom Line:
Fine DVD recording features and d good on-screen user-interface marred by a terrible front-panel user-interface and sub-standard reliability.
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Overall Rating:
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Author's Review
I bought this DVD player/recorder to replace a DVD player gone bust and to try to retire the VCR as a TV-recording device.
As a player, it's very good at it. The image quality is fine and its capability to start playing a movie skipping both trailers and the menu is welcome. More players should provide the "slip" function, which forwards a movie a few seconds, handy when skipping the smut that is pervasive in almost all films.
As a recorder, it doesn't provide much more quality or time than a regular VCR. The recording format which provides the longest time is useless, with a quality analogous to watching Internet videos through a dial-up modem.
Using the DVD-R in video-recording mode provided the convenience of using up the space of deleted recordings no matter in which order they were recorded. The navigation menu for the recordings is very good.
It could also control the cable-box just fine in order to record from scrambled cables at preset times.
Unlike other reviewers', this unit had a quite accurate clock.
But it had its glitches:
- some recordings would just be cut out or corrupt the DVD for no apparent reason.
- the front-panel may look sleek, but one can't see where the touch-sensitive buttons are until sliding the finger over the panel itself, when the "buttons" would light up.
- when changing channels or watching a DVD it could freeze up, requiring unplugging it.
- some digital channels would be removed from the list of found ones and show up later, probably because of signal level issues; yet the cable-box didn't have any problem tuning them.
In the end, I returned this unit in favor of a cable company -supplied DVR cable-box, for a monthly fee. Figuring the reliability issues, I guessed that this unit wouldn't last 2 years and then wouldn't be cost-effective compared to the DVR cable-box.
