Philips DVDR520H DVD Recorder with 80 GB Hard Drive
Unreliable & deterorating
Initially i was very happy with this item, it appeared to be everything i needed. However, with time, I've realised that the unit is flawed and unreliable. Phillips support is unhelpful and will not remedy the faults I have. The firmware upgrade has also not helped. The problems I have are; <br /> <br />1. The unit no longer recognises any 8*speed disks it writes, although it writes them adequately enough so that my other dvd player can read them. This happened after about 3 months of use. Phillips support said the unit could not support 8* disks even though there was no indication of this at the time of purchase. <br />2. The unit crashes a lot, particularly when editing progams. This has been a consistent problem, but seems to be getting worse with time. The only solution is to unplug the device, which necessitates a hard drive scan on boot up. I can only imagine what this is slowly doing to the hard drive. <br />3. Whilst writing discs which contain more than one \\"program\\", discs regularly become corrupt and totally unreadable. This doesnt seem to happen when only one program, say an M2 film is recorded onto a single disc, however try and and append several programs onto the same disc and there is a good chance the disc will die. When this happens discs are total scrap and unreadable anywhere, even cdrw. I have lost numerous recordings this way. <br /> <br />I will be returning my unit, and will not buy a phillips dvd recorder again. I am hugely disappointed.