Samsung DVD-R120 Progressive Scan DVD Recorder
Nice unit IF you can live with some problems
Strengths: Works like a VCR. Easy to use. Quality of picture. One touch recording. Price. <br /> <br />Weaknesses: Takes a long time for disc to load. Only displays the time when unit is off. No \\"Time Slip\\" feature. Several problems. <br /> <br />Summary: Overall I like this unit. It is very easy to use. The manual is comprehensive, but it is sometimes difficult to quickly find what you are looking for.  <br /> <br />The picture quality is very good, but deteriorates noticeably when recording in Extended mode (EP). Recording in High Quality mode (XP) will only record for about 50 minutes. Obviously, you can't record an hour show at the highest quality.  <br /> <br />Now for the problems:  <br /> <br />The playback of a recorded show almost always has the sound and picture out of sync. Sometimes it is perfectly in sync, but most of the time it is not in sync. This is very annoying! I contacted Samsung about this via e-mail, but have never heard back. When the sound and picture are horribly out of sync, I noticed that if you press stop and then play, the sync usually improves.  <br /> <br />Another problem involves errors with scheduling timer recordings. I have set up a schedule for all of my favorite shows. One of the scheduled recordings is every Wednesday at 7 pm. Even though it is set to record on Wednesday, it records every Thursday at 7 pm instead. To see what would happen, I tried scheduling every Thursday at 7 pm and it complained that there was a scheduling conflict. This issue is very annoying especially since it is not always a day off (example: every Saturday, Sunday and Tuesday schedules record on the correct day).  <br /> <br />Another annoying problem relates to the unit recovering space after deleting recorded programs. When you delete something, the space does not immediately become available. To make the available space known, I need to either power the unit off/on or eject the DVD. Here is an example, let's say that I have four 1 hour shows recorded. If I watch one of the shows and then delete it, the available time for recording remains the same. I would expect the available recording time to increase by 1 hour.  <br /> <br />I tried to update the firmware, but I didn't need to since the firmware update was the same version already on my unit. I hope that these issues can be addressed in a future firmware update. <br />