Lite-On AllWrite LVW-5005 DVD/CD Recorder
Ergonomically & Economically does Everything
I have now had the LVW-5005 for &#62;2 months. It has worked reliably for me, although I have not exercised fiddlier functions like pausing during recording. I bought it because it supports PAL and NTSC, DVD+/-R/RW, can be switched using the remote to region 0 (so you can play DVDs from different regions of the world), can easily flash in a new operating system (enables a very welcome 3hr recording mode), and was cheap. It is hard to get all that together in 2004. A pleasant surprise was the remote control-easily the most sensible and ergonomic layout of a remote I have ever seen. As others say, the manual could be much better-a list of error messages and their meaning would be good. An error like &#34;incorrect signal format&#34; turned out to arise when inserting a blank DVD-R (automatically initialsed) and then feeding a signal of the opposite type (PAL vs NTSC) from the last one it saw... that took a long time to diagnose. Also, I once had the need to reboot (cycle power) to clear an apparent disregard for some key presses on the remote. These are early-adopter hiccoughs, and would be easy to cope with if the manual explained things completely. Perhaps the next OS will fix all that.