Philips DVDR80 Progressive Scan DVD Player / Recorder
Better than a VHS recorder but is certainly not perfect
The concept of a DVD recorder is one that should offer all the features of a VHS video recorder with the additional convenience of not having a tape and superior image quality.<br />The Philips DVDR80 is probably analogous to early VHS recorders. Impressive new technology, but very much in its infancy. If this player has a processor inside, it must have been stolen from my Commodore VIC20. Switching on from standby takes about 15 seconds.. just exactly what it's doing during this time I've no idea. If you don't stare directly at the display when using the remote, you could easily think it didn't receive the commands - for some reason there's about a 1-3 second delay with everything.<br />As far a quality is concerned, so far I've only used non-branded cheap DVD+RW discs (less than £1 each ~US$1.75) and I've had no problems recording at all. The quality on M2 (2 hours max) is far superior to VHS.<br />Other issues currently include the lack of support for the UK FREEVIEW boxes, although Philips UK assure me that this will be dealt with in firmware upgrades in the &quot;near future&quot;. Just how long it takes to program a few macros by the Philips team I don't know, let's hope they have some kind of optimisation procedure though!<br />So, for £300 (~US$525) I'd say this is an expensive piece of new technology that's left plenty of room for improvement. If you want a DVD recorder now though I'd certainly consider this. (The Sony RDR GX3 isn't perfect either - search for reviews on Google and you'll soon discover it has its own problems).