Philips DVDR520H DVD Recorder with 80 GB Hard Drive
Noisy and unreliable
I bought and returned the DVDR520H. <br /> <br />1) Main problem was the loud noise from vibration when playing back R and RW discs, which made them impossible to watch. This didn't happen every time, but most. Commercial discs played back silently. <br /> <br />2) The machine crashes (freezes and has to be unplugged to reboot). On one occasion this happened when I programmed a recording. The recording didn't start and the controls were frozen. This means one can't have confidence programming will work. I wrote Philips to ask about software updates, got no answer until I insisted, then was sent an excerpt from the manual about how to program recording and nothing about updates. <br /> <br />3) Editing is unstable. A thumbnail image can be set. Then it moves by itself as much as 20-30 seconds if the file is split further on and has to be redone.