Philips HDRW720 DVD Recorder with 120 GB Hard Drive
Philips' best effort so far - watch out for that learning curve!
I had unsatsfactory results with Philips' earlier recorders, so I bought this with some reservations. Earlier recorders had a lot of problems with short laser lifetimes, and minimal editing ability. This one, however suits my needds. Let me state my mission first - I have a collection of about 1500 old fashioned laser discs that I want to back up before they give way to laser rot. About 20% have not made it to DVD, so recording them to digital format is the idea. So far I have recorded about 2/3 of them and here are my observations. 1) Editing a video stream from something that looks like a TV remote will be challenging under any circumstances. 2) 120 GB is a decent size for a working buffer but not for a collection 3) To do a better job you need a computer with a nonlinear editor like iMovie. Here is the way the unit works: The video stream is acquired from one of the inputs and programmed by time and channel. The video stream is compressed to MPG-2 and stored on a hard disc. The resulting stream can be editied to delete scenes like commercials, unwanted trailers, etc. (You can edit the video stream more than once.) You can then archive the edited stream on a DVD inserting titles, chapter marks etc. The DVD has some basic menu stuff, and the recorder does not provide for editing background or other cosmetic changes. (I wish it did.) A DVD can hold 6 hours of video without much degredation, and the image is quite watchable.  You can edit or archive a movie while you acquiring the video stream to the hard disc. It takes about 15 minutes to record a 2 hour movie DVD, and about 3 minutes to finalize the DVD after it is recorded. The editing of alpha information is much easier than the Panasonic and Sony systems and is a big step up from the earlier method Philips used. You can record one movie in a low quality mode and another track in high quality. A-to-D is pretty good, and loss is minimal. Remember that the quality of the final product is limited by the source quality. Some of my laserdiscs, like the Godfatehr collection were really good, and made super DVD's, while some of the B-movies made only fair copies. C'est la vie, I guess. <br /> <br />I don't see this recorder on the Philips website any more, so they my have stopped production. If I were to make a suggestion to them if they are considering an upgrade, it would be: 1) Include a keyboard jack, 2) Put in a bigger hard disc, 3) Make disc editing (especially title menus) more robust, and 4) beef uup integration with digital cable. These things aside, I don't think there is much wrong with the recorder. Face it, this is a transient technology, one we need to record our old VHS movies of the kids' birthdays, and occasionally the Knicks game while we are at work. To do these things, this recorder more than admirably does the job.