LG DR787T DVD Recorder

Well it's only fair to do another update. After trying two other recorders - Philips DVDR3505, and Samsung DVD-AR650 - which are not on epinions yet, so I can't review them, I ended up getting a second LG. I did because a lot of people reported not having the problems I had, which made me think that maybe I did get a defective one the first time.

The second unit worked much better indeed, but got damaged during a bad power surge at my house, so I had to exchange it. Now I am on the third one, and have to honestly say I am very happy with it. It doesn't have the heat problems of the first one, the vibrations are much less, and the tuner reception is excellent.

Over all I'd have to change my rating for this model. I am quite happy with it now, and intend to keep it.







I am so proud of Epinions! This model came out last week, and I thought it will take the forum at least a year to include it in the database, but here it is! If you've read my recent reviews you'll probably notice that I've gone through about 6 different DVD recorders with more frustration than satisfaction. Finally I decided to just wait for the new models with ATSC tuners, but to my surprise I didn't have to wait too long.

My choice was made even easier after I moved to a new house, and the cable guy that installed my internet wasn't as nice as the previous one and didn't leave the cable line unfiltered for me to get free basic cable. Illegal matters to the side, had he done that I would've gone for a DVD recorder with a built in hard drive, but since I can't afford $55 for cable, I am stuck with over-the-air. Regular NTSC signals are a nightmare to get cleanly without a huge roof-top antenna, and I have very little desire to break my neck climbing on the roof. I bought a $10 amplified antenna from Big Lots, but I could barely receive anything from standard NTSC signals. So I was very happy and excited to find the LG at the Best Buy shelf as soon as it came out a week ago.

I wasn't particularly thrilled with the price tag, but when you think about it, it's the same, and maybe less than the older generation recorders with just NTSC tuners. Not to mention that most new models coming out – two from Samsung, one from Sony don't have tuners at all, Philips, Panasonic, and Toshiba are about to release some with just NTSC/ATSC but no QAM, and not one has announced a hard drive recorder for this year yet. So when you put it in perspective for what it does, it's not as bad.

So let's see what does it do – well it has NTSC/ATSC/QAM tuners built in, it supports all recordable formats including DVD-RAM and double layer +/- R, and according to Best Buy's web site it has a 12 bit 108 Mhz Digital-to-analog converter, but after seeing the picture I seriously question that info.

Now to the most disappointing part – what it doesn't do. Although it will tune the digital over the air broadcasts and unscrambled digital cable channels, it will not output them in true high definition. Instead it down-converts all signals to standard 480 definition and then if connected with HDMI will upconvert the downresed signal. There is a debate as to why it does this – my opinion is greed, the company simply doesn't want you to have two devices in one so you will have to buy an extra HDTV tuner if your TV doesn't already have one built in. The tuner will also not decode Dolby Digital signals from the HDTV broadcasts, instead it sends PCM.

From other people's posts it seems like this alone is enough to turn most people off from this model. For right now it seems to meet my needs, because it does tune perfectly looking High Definition local stations, which look like a decent quality DVD on my standard tube TV, but blown on my 480p projector they look a bit soft and blurry. Since I've caught a major upgrade bug, and am desperately trying to save enough money to buy a new HD projector, so in that light I might wait and see if any of the other brands might output true HD signal.

With the $10 antenna the recorder tuned all of the local channels except the CW. Most of the other ones have one or two sub-channels – usually weather stations, which the tuner also tuned in well. In total now I have 12 digital channels, and one NTSC (the CW). Just out of hope I thought I'd plug in the cable that runs into my internet modem to see if the QAM tuner might make any difference. It took a painful 30 minutes to scan the cable frequencies, and when finished it said that it found over 100 channels! I started praying and switching them one-by-one, but my hopes were quickly crushed as none of the channels were really viewable – they'd only tune in for a few seconds then disappear then come back on, and like that, but none really could be received. On the analog frequencies it did pick up 4 channels (even though I am not paying for them), but they were all really boring – fitness TV, Oxygen, WE, and some religious station, so I didn't even bother feeding the cable line into it any more. I did get curious to see though how it will do with a legit cable line so I took the recorder to my boyfriend's house. The tuner again took over 30 minutes to scan (my bf only has basic cable so I could really check the QAM abilities). After it finished it found 114 channels. The weird part is, and I think this is a serious flaw, that for some reason it detects and saves even channels that are encrypted or scrambled, so after it is done scanning you have to spend another hour to manual figure out which channels are really clear and which ones are not and need to be deleted. Of all the 114 channels all the local HD channels worked fine, as well as all the music only channels from Time Warner (I am not talking MTV, VH1, but those that just keep playing music with some CD art on the screen), and also a bunch of premium movie channels, which to my surprise were not scrambled. I would say there were in total about 30 clear QAM channels on top of the 70 something basic analog cable channels. For someone with a basic cable connection I'd say this is well worth it.

Back at my house, I decided to program my first recording – "Desperate Housewives" (love the show). I used an old DVD+WR disc that I've used for over a year with my old recorder, just because it's pretty worn out and scratched, so I wanted to see if the LG will have any problems with it. It did not, after I put the disc in it said it needed to be reformatted, which took about a minute, and then it was ready to go. I didn't care much for the timer programming menu – there is no direct button to access it, instead you have to go through the general set up menu, then you manually select date, time, channel, speed, and there is no a separate box for repeat recording, instead you cycle through the date box which goes mo-fri, weekend only, every day, every week, and then it starts scrolling through different days. I've always found that method much less preferable than a separate box to select if you'd like to repeat a time slot more than once.

This record has yet another feature, which has its own box in the timer programming – IR blaster to control external cable or satellite boxes. I don't have either, so I haven't tried it, but it's there for those who need it. There is also a flex time mode, a nice feature for timer recording that adjusts the quality and speed depending on the duration of the program and the available space on the disc. Now one thing that a lot of people are curious about, and I am not perfectly clear on, but… from what I understand from discussing this matter with others, it seems like the recorder properly flags widescreen programs for anamorphic recording. Don't ask me what that means, as much as I can understand, it means that you can view widescreen material in their correct aspect ratios on both 16:9 and 4:3 TV sets (on 4:3 sets with black bars on top and bottom, rather than the image being stretched out of proportion). Every recording I've made with both widescreen and standard programs looks right on both my 4:3 tube TV and my 16:9 projector as long as the right aspect is selected in the recorder's menu.

I have never had much interest in editing recordings, simply because it is way too tedious and time consuming, but this LG is somewhat limited in this respect. There are only two auto chapter modes – at 5 and 10 minutes, and there is a manual chapter mark button, which I have not tried and can't say if those will show up on other machines, from my experience with other recorders they never do. I can't remember if there were any options to divide or merge titles and chapters after recording – again I simply have no desire to do those things.

As far as picture quality goes… I have very mixed feelings. As I said earlier, I question Best Buy's info about the 12 bit DAC as the picture simply doesn't look sharp enough on my projector, there is a lot of contouring around text and straight lines, and a higher amount of noise and grain in most material. With TV signals the picture looks definitely soft and blurry (on the small screen TV this is much less of a problem), with DVD it greatly depends on the quality of the disc, but it's certainly not the best player I've seen. I currently have it connected with the progressive scan to my projector, and S-video to my TV, luckily both connections are active at the same time, but if a resolution above 480p is selected, only the HDMI output becomes active, and all the other ones are switched off. My usual practice is to use interlaced feed to my projector, which uses Faroudja DCDi processing and is usually much better than what the players would do, but my cable is pretty old and has been introducing a lot of interference on the tuner signals, and silly me decided to buy a cable that on my projector only works with progressive scan signal. I have a point, and I am getting to it! The internal de-interlacing in this recorder is pretty weak, there is an unusual amount of imperfections in the image with DVD, and with TV signal it does a down-right poor job.

To wrap up, a few cosmetic things – this is a very cool looking unit. Finally seems like the companies have heard my cries, and all new models are showing up in black. This one has a super cool touch panel buttons on the front. They are awesome to look at, but less functional because they go off after 10 seconds, and you have to touch the panel once to activate them, and then again to press the desired function. Thus you can't turn on the unit by pressing the eject button. Speaking of which, the start up time is some what slow, but not incomparable to other units, and because of the touch panel buttons, ejecting the tray requires waiting for the unit to finish initializing the disc. I must admit I've been annoyed by this a few times, because certain discs have restrictions that will not allow the unit to eject the disc until it finishes playing all the FBI warnings and even sometimes the previews, so just to eject a disc one time I had to wait about 5 minutes. But the shallow streak in me is willing to put up with this for cool look.

I forgot to mention the connections panel. This unit is totally stacked with outputs – HDMI, component, S-video, composite, built-in RF modulator, both optical and coaxial digital out. But inputs are not good – only two coaxial – one on front, one on the back, NO S-VIDEO input at all! Of course no component either; there is a USB port on the front though – something I doubt I'll ever use.

The remote control is large and cluttered, but functional and works really well even if not pointed directly at the unit. I actually had troubles using it to program my universal remote, as no matter how much I was trying to point it away from the unit it would always send the command and the unit responds, I finally had to go in the other room to finish the task. The button I miss the most is timer programming, also I would've liked to have a dedicated button to cycle between DVD and TV, the only way to do that is to stop DVD playback. There is another super cool feature: Picture-in-Picture – during playback if you press the PIP button a small window pops up with picture from the tuner, and then with the arrow keys you can change the channel in the small window and move it around the screen – way cool!

Two more things – finally a recorder that shows the time on the front panel, but only in TV mode, with the disc spinning there is no way to see the clock, not even on the on-screen menu. Also the info display shows both the elapsed and the remaining time of the title. And finally, heat… the unit gets quite warm sometimes excessively so, and when the disc is spinning inside it vibrates a good bit too.

Well I am a sucker for cool design, and with all this features I am leaning towards keeping this recorder. Its performance is quite mediocre in most respects, but in the world of DVD recorders this is very common. For anyone with even basic cable connection a previous generation recorder with a hard disc will be a much smarter choice.


****I always miss a few things that I remember about later...

There is also a DV input for camcorders...

Commercial skip - but only in forward motion, no instant repeat, and the commercial skip is fixed to 30-second-increments (I loved the Samsung DVD-R135 you could set it up from 10 seconds up to a minute).

Bookmarks - mark scenes on a disc and search through them later.

Resume play - finally! Works even if the disc is ejected, but only remembers the last disc, still much better than no resume at all.