Sony RDR-GX7 DVD Recorder
the superior audio/picture is no longer good enough
I keep buying Sony products because I have convinced myself that audio quality and perhaps picture quality is the best on the market. So I keep telling myself to put up with all of the flaws and limitations and there are many! First flaw - SUSCEPTIBILTY TO BREAKDOWN. (And, no, I handle everything with care!) All Sony products I have owned - VCRS, tvs, discmen, walkmen, stereos, headphones - break down more easily than others - average lifespan about 6 months to 1 year before the first breakdown. Other products last several years before needing repair if any - I've had a Kenwood stereo that has lasted me dince 1987 and is still going strong; I had a GE TV that lasted 11 years before I replaced it with a Sony flatscreen in 2002. My Pioneer laserdisc player has lasted since 1996. I have a Panasonic dvd player that has done fine for 5 years. After Hitachis plummeted bigtime I started buying Sony vcrs in the mid-nineties and put up with the frequent trips to Circuit City repair because they played my older tapes better than any other. But I have very little reason to buy Sony products from now on. First, the newer SLV-N500 VCRs are flimsy and the picture is worse. And finally I'll get to the dvd players because that is what we're dealing with here. I bought a Sony multi-disc DVP-NC600 in 2002 and have already made three trips to repair it. Now we come to the second flaw in Sony products - SENSITIVITY. When I first bought the NC600 I immediately had trouble with it playing dvds that my Panasonic had no problem playing whatsoever. Almost every other dvd - even the new ones, the unblemished ones, ones with the faintest of marks - would be declared dirty, unplayable, would freeze, would skip back. I handled them on their edges, I kept them in their cases, I babied them. I stuck with the Sony dvd player because I could immediately tell that through my Sony headphones the audio for, say, Moulin Rouge, was better than in my Panasonic. Unfortunately, I got tired of wiping M. Rouge off with a tissue every ten minutes and putting it back in the Sony whereas it plays perfectly in the Panasonic. Ditto with many other dvds. When it finally came time to get a dvd recorder, I considered the RDR-GX7 but knowing it would give me a headache with skipping and freezing I went with the Panasonic DMR-E80H with the 80GB hard drive. Everything was perfect until it kept giving me power troubles. Finally, in just a matter of 3 weeks, the E80H blew up on me. Rather than consider the possibility of having a bad egg and swapping for another Panasonic I went with the Sony. My #1 priority, after all, was converting old videotapes to dvd-r and I read and felt from experience that the picture/sound quality was sure to be better. I could always play the dvds I made with the Sony on other dvd players. And the picture/sound quality is superb, I admit. Quite frankly, there is not so much skipping/freezing going on so far in the eight months I have had it. But there is some, too many skips for a unit that is overpriced....OK, next flaw - COPYGUARDS. The RDR-GX7 is slave to both the Macrovision and CGMS/A. I don't care what the MPAA shoves down the consumers' throats - this organization which years ago wanted to ban the VCR and made ridiculous rhetorical comparisons likening the VCR to the Boston Strangler and threatens private collectors who just want to trade material like old tv shows, failed pilots, footage interviews, etc THAT IS NOT COMMERCIALLY AVAILABLE!!!!!! - is run by a bunch of BULLIES. A person has every right to make a back-up copy of a store-bought dvd he or she OWNS - these Sonys are scratching up dvds left and right. A person has every right to make compilations for one's own PRIVATE USE - some of us were film students and needed to make compilations for projects or some of us as a hobby do like to make compilations of actors' scenes or music scenes or whatever one pleases. One also ought to be allowed to make dvd-r copies of old commercial tapes that ARE NOT AVAILABLE on dvd! THERE IS NOTHING MORALLY WRONG WITH THIS!!! It's all about the MPAA members being kept from buying a few extra yachts. Off my soapbox I go. Next flaw - this may seem like nitpicking but anybody who uses these things a lot is probably getting aggravated by this, too. THE RDR-GX7 IS SLOW - LOADING DISC DATA, WRITING DISC DATA, OPENING/CLOSING - it takes forever. Whenever I record off of live tv I am always making a backup VHS recording because I know I can't trust this dvd recorder. I've only used the timer a couple of times and everything looked set and ready to go, and a brand new formatted disc was in the drive, and both times I woke up the next morning and got an \\"unplayable disc error.\\" So I haven't used the timer since. But when I am there monitoring the recording I still make the backup because many times it will be recording and suddenly stop and declare a brand new clean disc dirty or unplayable, and then a big white square pops up on the screen \\"Writing Disc Data\\" and you have to sit there and wait several seconds and by then you've lost a chunk of the program. \\"WDD\\" message pops up on the screen everytime you stop the recording to, say, change modes or accidentally hit the stop or whatever - it's unnecessary. The player also automatically loads if you have a disc in there - not a big inconvenience but still I'm noting it here as another flaw because it is \\"loading disc data\\" for several seconds and you can't get those seconds of your life back. And I'll nitpick further - get rid of the big white boxes containing error messages or finalizing messages or whatever that hog the middle of the screen - some of us are trying to watch tv! I keep my cable running through my Sony VCR underneath the dvd recorder because - as I said - I only feel safe simulataneously making VHS and DVD copies because the RDR-GX7 cannot be trusted as I explained above. I've about had it with Sony..