Rating: 
Summary: A good recorder for the price.
Review: This recorder is still hard to come by. I have had about 30 days experience with it, and here are my thoughts. The good: 1) Intuitive menu's that I have grown to appreciate 2) burns a disc successfully and plays on my 3 other dvd players in the house. Here is the not so good: 1) 1 button record only records, for example, it does not give you the option of 30 minutes, 60 minutes and so on. I wish it would. 2) It is finicky playing audio cd's. This is a big drawback. 3) I think it takes a while to load the disc (I am not sure if that is representative of all recorders, but it seems a little long 4) It's odd that the S-Video port is not enabled out of the box. You need to be aware of this before you return it. Hook it up to a composite video source first and then enable the s-video. Lite-on has a good reptuation for their PC products. This unit appears to have positive reviews overseas.
Rating: 
Summary: Not ready for primetime
Review: When I saw this DVD recorder on sale I was amazed that prices had dropped so fast, but after having it for 30 days I just find myself wishing I had been a little less impulsive. At first it worked quite well, the recording quality on HQ,SP and even EP are quite good. I noticed a number of artifacts during quick screen transitions or fast motion, but compared to VHS recordings the colors are much richer, edges sharper, and one of the nicest surprises is the ability to fast forward at various speeds to jump over commercials. How could I give this up? The cons...1) disc failures with DVD+RW media can render recordings and whole discs unusable (happens 5% of time)
2) startup time is a painful 30-60 seconds (swapping discs can take over a minute)
3) you can only record 3h 50m on 4h disc, 1h55m on 2h disc, etc. This seems like no big deal until you start recording 1h programs and up to half of each DVD is wasted!
4) menus are slow and difficult to navigate
5) DVD+R/W media only plays in DVDs made in past 1-2 years.
6) discs are not spun down when idle, and recorder gets very hot.
7) interface for mp3 and jpeg playback is horrible. But judge for yourself; go try one out at the store. It does everything it claims to, but given the above problems, I just can't recommend it. If you are considering buying a DVD-recorder I would wait 6 months for the next generation of recorders to come out in this price range.
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