Philips DVDR75 Progressive-Scan DVD Player/Recorder
Works Great. .. At first.
I bought this machine back in May, 2003 and up to Late Janurary 2004 it worked great.  Maybe 2 disc errors during all that time, which is reasonable.  Recorded off tv on +R/RW just fine, where even the M4 setting looked way better than vhs.<br />Then the problems started.  At first it just stopped recording on the +R philips dvds I had.  It would burn for maybe 5-8 seconds then shut off.  Very annoying if you set the timer to record something you know you wanted to keep only to find out it didn't even record.  So fine, I returned the pack of 50 philips for 50 tdk's.  And at first great.  Out of the first 30 tdk's one error, but the rest all recorded fine.  Then the tdk's started acting up, 4 out of 5 had disc errors and now you can't even record to them at all.  Same thing as the philips dvd's.  Burn for 5-8 seconds, then shuts off.<br />So finally Sony's +R discs went on sale for $1 each.  I bought some.  Hey these are top of the line dvds, they gotta work.  First one, disc error.  The rest in the box won't even burn at all.  5-8 seconds then shuts off.<br />So now I'm faced with a player that will only burn to +RW.  Ugh.<br />Not to mention that the other reviews about white out are spot on.  Try and record a movie or transfer a vhs tape with alot of bright scenes and it's unwatchable.  I will say that most movies/tv shows don't have this problem, but yeah for home movies filmed outside (and that's what most people want to save anyway) it's horrible.<br />And the final problem is that old vhs tapes with tracking errors seem to create a bad wobble effect when put onto dvd making them unwatchable.  Of course that's likely the age of the vhs tapes and no fault of the recorder.  But it's still a pain.<br />I was promised by their customer support to get a firmware upgrade(when the firmware downloaded from their website wouldn't load at all).  But I believe that will work as much as I believe in the easter bunny.  And hey if it does work I'll make sure to raise the review at least 1 star.<br />So all in all avoid this recorder unless you only want a good recorder for about 9 or so months and can afford to buy a new one every year.<br />And it looks like the other brands are no help since even the best reviewed sony won't even record to +R(why make something that will record to -R/-RW and +RW but leave out +R???) making these +R discs useless.