Best of the 2007 ATSC DVD Recorders

This unit, purchased a couple of weeks ago, is the sixth ATSC DVD recorder I've owned in 2007. The first five went back; this one, at least so far, is a keeper.

I get television strictly via over-the-air, as opposed to cable or satellite. My ATSC DVD recorder buying spree began in March, when my Motorola HDT100 ATSC tuner, purchased in 2003 for $320, died. I quickly realized that for less money than I had paid for just a tuner, I could get a unit that records as well.

What sets the DVDR3575H apart from most other models on the market is the 160 GB hard drive (Polaroid makes a hard drive unit as well but it has not gotten as good reviews as this one). It has changed the way I watch TV for a couple of reasons. First off, at the default record mode it will hold 66 hours of programs, versus 2 for a DVD. There are a lot of shows I will watch if I happen to be in front of the set when they come on, but as a practical matter wouldn't bother to record if I was bumping up against a two hour DVD capacity and constantly having to keep track of how full the disk is, having to erase disks, having to jockey multiple disks, etc. With 66 hours to play with, those considerations go away.

The second major advantage is the ability to do chase play. I usually watch the News Hour with Jim Lehrer at 6 followed by the Nightly Business Report at 7. If my train is late, I'll miss the first few minutes of the News Hour. With the hard drive, not a problem - just hit the play button and it starts playing from the beginning while still recording the rest of the show. If the phone rings I can just hit pause and then continue watching after I take the call. When Tivo came out I read rave reviews about this feature but wasn't willing to spring for both cable and Tivo monthly charges. Having finally experienced this capability first hand it is absolutely wonderful and the fact that you can get it without paying a monthly fee makes it even more wonderful.

This unit does not automatically start buffering live TV when turned on. If you're watching something and want chase play capability you have to hit either the record button or the pause live TV button. The difference is that hitting the record button will create a recording that stays on the hard drive until you delete it; with pause live TV there is no way to save the buffer. If you're absolutely sure you won't want to watch the show again and don't want to be bothered with having to delete the title later, hit pause live TV. Otherwise, hit record.

A third, more minor, advantage of the hard drive is that there is no reason to keep a DVD loaded in the tray. A pet peeve when I owned the Philips DVDR3505 (a similar unit to the 3575 except no hard drive) was that if you normally had a DVD in the unit because you had shows you regularly recorded, when you turned the unit on it would load the disk and throw you into a menu of recorded titles, whether you wanted to go there or not. To just watch TV, you had to push the stop button on the remote. The 3575 is much more friendly to those who use it, as I do, as their primary vehicle for watching TV. Other advantages of the 3575 over the 3505 are that the 3575 is noticeably faster to start working when turned on and faster to scan a new channel when you change channels (3 seconds versus 5-7 seconds for the 3505).

Other cool features of the 3575:
1. The remote has a toggle button with skip on one end and replay on the other, with the times programmable from five seconds to five minutes. I like having them both set at thirty seconds, and have auto chapters set at five minutes to make navigating though titles easy.
2. Press the rapid play button once during playback slows the recording to 80% of normal speed while retaining the audio. Press again and it speeds up to 125% still with the audio. Pretty cool.

Now, to some of the disadvantages of this machine. It records in standard def and cannot even pass a high def signal through to your TV. This is true of all of the 2007 ATSC recorders. The only way I know to record high def is to do it on a PC using a product such as AutmnWave's Creator. I didn't want to go that route because a) I don't have a HDTV yet, and b) even if I did it's pricey. The ideal recorder in my opinion would be a stand alone unit that records high def (with about 3 terabytes of memory) but my guess is that it will be another year or two before such units become available. For $300 the 3575 downconverts and then upconverts - that ought to be good enough for anyone who is the least bit price sensitive.

Another quibble is that the 3575 will not let you add a digital channel manually. If you live in an area where you can receive ATSC channels from several locations and need to use an antenna rotator to move between them, you won't be happy because you will have to rescan channels every time you want to receive from a different location. In my case this wasn't a deal breaker. Most of the Philly stations are in a cluster about 11 miles from me, but there 2 other stations 30 miles away and about 40 degrees more to the east. With my old Motorola tuner I'd have to use the rotator to go between the two locations and I'd lose the New Jersey stations in the summer when the trees leafed out; the tuner in the 3575 is much better at pulling in stations, allowing me to receive from New Jersey year round, and doesn't require rescanning. It's also less fussy about the antenna being pointed directly at the station.

More drawbacks:
1. There is no way to edit names of timer programs. I could edit a recording of the News Hour after it has been recorded to name it "News Hour", but there is no reason I would go to the trouble because I'm only going to watch it once. If it automatically named each recording "News Hour", on the other hand, that would make it easier to find in the title list.

2. There is no way to defrag the hard drive. Delete all titles is as close as they come.

3. Some owner have complained on AVS Forum that they've had problems with the QAM tuner forgetting digital cable channels. Doesn't affect me because I'm strictly over-the-air.

4. Similarly there have been problems with editing out scenes, a feature I haven't tried yet.

Finally, I'd like to get up on my soapbox about the compelling economic case for going over-the-air only. Many people are sports nuts or C-span junkies and would never give up pay TV for that reason. But for people like me who don't watch all that much TV and watch mostly PBS programming, then assuming you already have a TV, you pay $300 for this unit, another $300 or so for a rooftop antenna and you're set, as opposed to $60/month, $720/ year, $7,200 /decade for cable. Just something to think about. (And if you're worried your friends would look at you like you have two heads if you ditched cable, do what I do. Tell them you used to have cable but upgraded to wireless digital.)