Samsung DVD-R130 DVD Recorder
Great recorder if you never play discs on another machine
This is the second recorder I purchased in what I thought would be an easy quest. After reading reviews and doing lots of research, I purchased a Panasonic recorder. Big mistake. The tuner quality was poor which translated into poor quality discs. Returned it and bought the R130. It saved me some dollars but had less features. <br /> <br />In particular, it can only write to -R/RW media. The Panasonic could write to +R/RW/RAM media as well. No big deal though. Sometimes the R130 takes a long time to finalize whereas the Panasonic was much quicker. Again, no big deal. <br /> <br />I must say the picture quality was far better for the R130. The tuner worked well and the disks were of much better visual quality. But now for the bad part, very very bad. <br /> <br />The disks the R130 creates can only be read reliably on itself. I tried multiple brands of disks but that is not the problem. The problem is with the format of the disk. In my tests, I created a DVD with 4 tv episodes. The R130 creates a title menu for each episode. This works fine when played on itself. <br /> <br />The disk though won't play properly on my Sony DVD player. When you insert the disk, it skips the menu and goes right to the first episode. If you bring up the disk and try and play any other episode, the player gives you an error. I tried creating multiple disks on the R130 and the results were always the same. <br /> <br />Next I tried to play my test disks on my desktop. I have two players, Plextor & Benq and both WinDVD and PowerDVD players. Sometimes the disk would hang the drive (either one). When I got a disk that wouldn read, using either Windvd or PowerDvd on any player, the DVD would start playing and skip the menu. With WinDVD, I was usually able to access the menu and use it to select episodes. With PowerDVD if I was able to get to menu, it would get stuck there. I was not able to select any episode nor go back to play. <br /> <br />Not being able to play the R130 disks elsewhere wasa major flaw of this player. The price was great and the disc quality when played on itself was great so if thats all you need maybe this player is ok for you. I wound up replacing it with the Sony GX330. This player does what I would expect and creates high quality discs that are compatible! You get what you pay for.