Did you spend Christmas in front of your jumbo flatscreen amazed at the pristine pictures yielded by the DVDs Santa brought? And did you wonder why your videotape of Match of the Day looked as insipid as West Ham’s defence? Well, worry no longer, for the video cassette is dead: now your recordings can rival the quality of live broadcasts.
DVD recorders can cost as little as £100 from a credible brand. While early models were awkward to operate, unreliable and plagued by incompatibility, the latest ones are simpler and do what they should.
By opting for a DVD recorder with a built-in Freeview tuner (as with four of the units here), you can shed one box from that clutter under your television. These offer an EPG (electronic programme guide), which makes setting the recorder a matter of clicking on the name of a show.
Some models also have a hard drive that works like the Sky+ or Freeview PVR (personal video recorder) boxes previously reviewed by InGear — see http://tinyurl.com/yftp2c. A hard-drive-based recorder does away with the need to find a blank disc as a show starts. But combining a hard drive with a DVD recorder (a “hybrid”), means that when the hard drive is full (160GB equates to about 80 hours) you can burn what you want to keep onto a DVD.
Hybrids offer the further bonus of timeshifting — effectively pausing live broadcasts when the phone rings, then continuing viewing where you left off. Many also perform a PVR’s best trick of “rewinding” live broadcasts. This is by virtue of a “live cache” — a buffer area of the hard drive that continuously records any programme being watched — which is great for replays if you miss a hilarious punchline. But there are drawbacks. No current DVD recorder has two Freeview tuners, so even a hybrid won’t let you watch one Freeview programme while recording another. Convenience also carries a premium. Many makers concentrate hard on packing features into recorders but the menus are often sluggish or unintuitive. Worse still, using the machines as straight DVD players may not provide pictures as good as from similarly priced nonrecording machines, while sound quality can be inferior.
If you already own an HD-ready television, recorders that offer upscaling (see jargon buster) promise to boost the picture quality of those standard DVDs from Santa, so on an HD-ready screen they can look tremendous. Four of the models reviewed can upscale (not the Toshiba and the Philips) but this is a key function only if implemented well: only on two of them (Sony and Panasonic) did upscaling perceptibly enhance the picture.
All DVD recorders make extravagant claims about their capacity. However, unless you’re determined to squeeze eight hours of programming onto one disc, stick to the higher-calibre settings. Otherwise, quality declines rapidly.
That other bugbear, the disc format war that has raged for years, has to some extent been banished, because the majority of current machines play most kinds of recordable DVDs, or at least the main write-once versions, namely DVD+ and DVD. Be wary of rewritable DVDs (denoted by the suffix RW) as these may prove incompatible on a friend’s player. Similarly, dual-layer discs offer almost twice the recording capacity of a normal DVD but are choosy about which machines they will play back on.
None of the machines reviewed here can read HD (high definition) discs, and it will be a while before an affordable HD recorder hits the shops. By then, hopefully the format war between HD-DVD and Blu-ray will be resolved and players and recorders will be compatable with both.
Jargon buster
5.1 Five small speakers — or satellites — plus a subwoofer for bass, the surround-sound system used in most home cinema setups
Blu-ray High-definition video disc format that aims to succeed current DVDs. See also HD-DVD
EPG (electronic programme guide). On-screen listings guide that can be used to book a programme for recording
Hard drive/hard disk High-capacity tape-free storage device
HD (high definition). Television technology that provides clearer pictures
HD-DVD Blu-ray’s competitor as the high-definition disc format that may eventually replace DVD
HDMI Digital connector that transfers both audio and video to your TV
Live cache Common PVR feature that enables timeshifting (see below)
PVR (personal video recorder). Hard-drive-based TV recorder
Timeshifting Often used to mean recording live transmissions to view later without archiving onto DVD. Actually means using a hard drive to “pause” or “rewind” live broadcasts
Upscaling Boosting picture quality from current DVDs to a standard that can, in some cases, approach HD
BUDGET TITAN
Panasonic DMR-EZ25 DVD recorder
Typically £200, or £179 from www.digitaldirect.co.uk
Five stars
Tremendous DVD recorder at a great price, despite no hard drive
If you already own a PVR, or don’t wish to splash out too much, this DVD-only (there’s no hard drive) Panasonic is a fine option that delivered good sound on test, as well as strong pictures. A built-in Freeview tuner made setting the machine a doddle, and it is compatible with all current discs. Recordings were especially good in higher-quality modes. In playback, images can be upscaled with visible improvement through an HDMI output. The DMR-EZ25 partially makes up for its lack of a hard drive by recording onto the rarer DVD-RAM format, which offers parlour tricks such as “chasing playback” (you can watch a recording of the start of, say, Life on Mars while the machine is still capturing the end). However, you often can’t enjoy these discs on other DVD players. Nevertheless, this is a stand-out device.
VERSATILE GENIUS
Sony RDR-HXD860 DVD/HDD recorder
Typically £400, or £297 from www.amazon.co.uk
Five stars
Deeply versatile machine with classy playback and few faults
Sony has led the pack for hybrid DVD recorders and this beast is the most impressive yet. The RDR-HXD860 boasts a decent Freeview tuner, a handy HDMI socket and a 160GB hard drive (enough for about 80 hours of recording). It also records most DVD formats, and will play, though not record, DVD-RAM discs. Playback offers upscaling, which produced notably crisper and more vibrant results — including on Freeview broadcasts, which is a valuable bonus. The Series Recording feature makes it easy to record every episode of Ugly Betty, for example, even if broadcast times change during the series. There are gripes, such as no live cache for “rewinding” live TV, sound that’s merely adequate (especially with CDs) and DVD-recording quirks. Even so, there is no finer all-round choice. Excellent.
EDITOR'S FRIEND
JVC MH300 DVD/HDD recorder
Typically £400, or £280 from www.electricaldiscountuk.co.uk
Three stars
Decent hybrid, hampered by foibles and no Freeview
For the fastidious archiver, this JVC hybrid A live cache function also happily provides the option of “rewinding” live television by up to three hours. But for all that, menus weren’t intuitive and responded slowly. Although you can upscale playback (through an HDMI socket) the results were a letdown. Regular playback and sound were good, but the baffling absence of a Freeview tuner limits this copies from hard disk to DVD very well, with transfer speeds of up to 64x real time. Neat editing features abound, too, such as the ability to alter the order of recordings or delete parts of them — commercials, for instance — before committing them to disc. Or, if you are recording to DVD and space runs out, it automatically switches to the hard drive.
FLAWED DIAMOND
LG RH200MH DVD/HDD recorder
Typically £450, or £400 from www.richersounds.com
Three stars
Pricey recorder giving solid performance, but no Freeview
This hybrid DVD recorder boasts a capacious and its slick, well-laid-out menus proved easy to 250GB hard drive — enough for 125 episodes of ER — though editing options other than simple cutting and pasting are crude. Worse still, the LG lacks a Freeview tuner. It does record to every DVD format other than dual-layer DVD-R, and manages super-fast copying from hard drive to DVD. The LG features two front-mounted memory-card slots use. It produced top-notch recordings on the two better-quality settings once connected to a Freeview box. The primary colours of BBC News 24 were rich and clean, while even fast-moving footage remained stable. The HDMI socket delivered sharper results than Scart, but upscaling made no visible difference. Good, but pricey given its omissions.
QUIRKY TOOL
Philips DVDR7260H DVD/HDD recorder
Typically £350, or £289 from www.pixmania.co.uk
Three stars
Innovative, but using it is like wading through treacle
With this Philips, home cinema buffs can proved rich and cinematic. When recording, archive movies onto DVDs with 5.1 surround there was a big drop in quality at all but the top sound. However, only Sky broadcasts in 5.1, setting. Live pictures are, bizarrely, displayed in and an adaptor is required. There is a huge live cache and the last six hours of the channel being watched are captured (temporarily) on the 160GB hard drive, so you can retrospectively record programmes. Despite lacking an HDMI connection, DVD playback of the movie Seven the recording mode selected, so live TV looked grotty unless the machine was set to best quality. Despite Philips’s bold claims of “sense and simplicity” the Freeview EPG was not particularly viewer-friendly and the machine responded slowly to the remote.
CORNER-CUTTER’S FOLLY
Toshiba D-R160 DVD recorder
Typically £130, or £95 from www.comet.co.uk
Two stars
Stripped-down recorder with good playback, but fatal flaws
As a nononsense entrant into digital recording this Toshiba partly succeeds. It is blissfully simple to operate, editing features are decent and DVD playback is good — the opening sequence of Revenge of the Sith was vivid and packed with detail. However, it works with only two formats of recordable disc — DVD-R and DVD-RW — which limits its versatility. This stripped-down approach is typical: there’s no Freeview tuner, nor is there an HDMI output (unsurprising at this price), nor even an RGB-enabled Scart input, needed to record a decent signal from an external source. So with the D-R160 you may only record from, say, a Sky+ box using a much-inferior composite connection, which on recordings created dotty noise around the edges of objects, such as captions. Bargain price, basic fodder.
Research supplied by What Home Cinema magazine. Prices include VAT and delivery
