Philips DVDR75 Progressive-Scan DVD Player/Recorder
A good, but not great, product
This product suffers from my pet peeve when it comes to some consumer-grade electronics these days: some jackass with a biz-school degree at a major electronics firm decided that it was acceptable to ship a product with sub-standard software, forcing customers to upgrade the firmware afterwards to achieve stability, and unfortunately, other jackasses at other companies thought this was a swell idea.  <br />I've seen this with most of the Linksys products I've purchased, for example, but I assumed that, since routers are a geeky subject anyway, that was somehow more acceptable.  <br />But this certainly shouldn't be acceptable for a device that's supposed to be easy enough for my grandmother to use (it's supposed to replace her VCR, isn't it?).<br />My device froze up a couple of times and intermittently refused to recognize blank discs over the first few days, which set off an immediate jackass alert in my mind.  <br />Why do I still own one, you ask?  Because, once I got over the initial hurdle of:<br />* upgrading the firmware (if you don't have a CD burner or don't want to bother downloading and burning the firmware, call Philips support at 1-800-531-0039 and they'll send you the appropriate firmware CD in the mail - doesn't hurt to ask for this as soon as you get this device even if you aren't seeing any immediate problems);<br />* learning the non-intuitive user interface (it's no TiVO, that's for sure - expect to spend a few hours playing with the menus with the manual in hand); and,<br />* navigating the Philips Web site ([...] and especially its support area - I could not find support questions/faqs for this product (though I did find the firmware and manuals), and no-one answered the support chat, even though I waited for over ten minutes;<br />I realized that, for the money, this is a good buy.  No, really, it is.  These are the early heady days for DVD recorders, and so I have to expect some warts to be present.  This is a first-generation DVD recorder, after all, and offers a great mix of features for the price, especially when compared to similar items from Panasonic and Sony (I didn't consider the products from Gateway and GoVideo seriously).<br />Here are some warts you should be aware of (a few of which may have already been mentioned in other reviews):<br />* The interface allows you to enter many characters for the disc and title names, but only displays a subset of these names on playback on the menu screen.<br />* If you hide a chapter recorded on a DVD+R disc, then it will correctly be hidden on playback on the same machine, but not on other DVD players.  (This problem does not apparently occur on DVD+RW discs.)<br />* The device is limited on video inputs (you can only hook up one S-video/composite video input and one component video input).  So I could not, for example, connect both my TiVO and VCR directly to it (receivers that can handle multiple video inputs help to deal with such situations).  It's a little unfair to bring this up, since this is a natural consequence of buying a relatively cheap piece of hardware.<br />* To switch between video inputs, you need to switch to the monitor mode and press channel-up or -down.  I had to call support to figure that one out.  Given that there are only a very small number of inputs, providing buttons for each on the remote would've been much better.<br />A final note: Philips' phone support is quite good.  The first-tier guys were easy to reach (hold time was less than a minute on each of the four or five occasions I've called them) and were quite knowledgeable (you can imagine my surprise).