Samsung DVD-VR330 DVD Recorder
A DVD recorder not for everybody
Like many of the other reviewers, I purchased this device to transfer my old VHS tapes onto DVD. MISTAKE!!!! Although I was able to copy a couple after making a few coasters I quickly discovered that it records in a proprietary format. That's right, the DVDs you make on this machine will not play on your PC or any other DVD player, except perhaps another Samsung player. Nowhere in the product description or specifications does it mention this crucial fact. This wasn't mentioned in any of the reviews, either, and when I spotted it in a DVD-VR320 review I figured it didn't apply to the 330 model. Well, now you know. With the general trend these days towards open source and open standards this proprietary Samsung DVD recorder is a real throwback. <br /> <br />If you don't need to transfer tapes to DVDs that you want to play somewhere else this would be an alright machine. The quality is good and the controls are not too difficult. I thought it was pretty noisy - there's a fan on the back of the box to cool it down. It seems you can only watch whatever it is you're recording, so if you're not interested in watching that while transferring your tapes you better not plan on sleeping in the same room because of the noise. If you do decide to go with this you better hope that Samsung continues to support this format in their DVD players or you could be stuck with disks that won't play anywhere.