Question about Home DVD recorders

[droiddr]

Hi,

This may be slightly off topic but here goes:

I saw recently on wall mart's web site some home DVD recorders (I don't mean the PC DVD writters). Their price was around 400-500$

Some of them record on DVD ram some record on DVD +R/RW. I was wondering if anybody here has tried or owns a home DVD recorder. What are their quality? Are they worth it?. It seems the price is getting right.

Feedback anyone???
See ya all soon!

[Kennyshin]

You mean standalone DVD-Video recorders as CE (consumer electronics) products. Visit http://www.dvdplusrw.org and its forums for DVD+R/DVD+RW DVD recorders.

DVD recorders using DVD-RAM are very popular in Japan.

[CameraMan]

At my work place, we have three Panasonic DVD-R/RAM recorders, two have hard drives in them.

The ones without a hard drive are not worth the money, as far as I can tell. Once you record to a DVD-R, it's on there. You can trim the clips, arrange a play order.

We record a daily show, and use the disc-only unit as a backup onto DVD-RAM. End of the day, the clips are trimmed slightl and played back. Since we don't keep the RAM disc, clips are not named.

With the HD recorder, we trim, re-arrange and name all the clips.. Then burn it to a DVD-R for next day replay (and archive). We need to re-run the show within 20 minutes of it ending, and putting titles on clips with these machines is pure hell. Imagine a keyboard on the screen and you have to navigate it all with up/down/left/right buttons. There are short cuts, but my boss like to use LONG titles. So.. the RAM recorder comes in handy.

I like the HD units best, of course. You can record a whole night's worth of shows in XP mode, then trim, edit, delete, do what ever you want before commiting to a DVD-R.

I don't think you can read the DVD-R discs back to the HD though.

The HD units cost a fair chunk though, but are well worth it for industrial video use.

Oh ya, the disc-only unit uses cartridge-type RAM discs, but the HD units only have normal tray loaders (though they can use non-cased RAM discs). Everything is 1x speed.

[droiddr]

Thanks!

Will look into it more.
If you can record TV stuff on DVD +RW its going to completely replace VHS players since before we didn't have affordable standalone DVD recorders.. Quality must be MUCH better and you probably can record HDTV and its like at full resolution right ???????(720x480)

THe harddisk ones also offer a lot of promise too.

Thanks,
See ya.