Sony RDR-GX7 DVD Recorder
It's the same price as my first BETAmax 20 years ago!
We bought this after reading up on all of the available similar products, and we've had it about 3 weeks now.  Setup was just slightly complicated because I had to hook it up to my AV receiver, but Sony tech help was great and I had it up and running about an hour after I brought it home.  Recording is fairly straightforward.  I still haven't figured out all of the features (haven't had time) but I've been able to transfer several of our 10 to 16- year old home movies (VHS) and one from our old 8mm recorder as well.  We don't have any digital camcorders (having not really made any home movies lately) so we haven't tried the iLink feature at all.  Recording shows off of the TV is easy and quick.  I read complaints about the time it takes to load the DVD each time...well, it takes a while to rewind a tape, too!  Why the impatience?  It takes less than 30 seconds to load a DVD...just turn on the unit, and go start the dishwasher or something!  We've recorded several TV shows, and some football games since we bought the unit, and all the speeds have superior picture to the VHS VCR we had (also a Sony unit, btw).  I don't recommend using the SLP speeed unless you have to (it was a good thing we did for one game; there was a 90 minute weather delay and we would have missed the end of the game had we not set it for 5 hours.  The SLP speed's picture is about like a VHS, and not a good quality one.  However, the other speeds (there are six altogether) are all superior to our VHS.  So far, we're loving this!  Now that  it's so affordable (We paid the same price--$429.95 for our Sony BetaMax 22 years ago...how funny is that?? ).  Who knew all the advances they'd make in 20 years.      Just wanted to add that I've now had the unit for 5 months and still works great :)    7 years later, I've transferred all my old VHS tapes to DVD.  We no longer have any day to day use for this, but a good friend has borrowed it to transfer all of HER VHS home movies to DVD.  Still works after all these years...who knew that we'd all have dvrs in our TVs so soon?