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Of course, you have to give up something to get something, and the DRT800 is distinctly limited compared with a typical DVD/hard-disk combo recorder. For one thing, you can't record directly onto DVD. You first have to capture your program onto the 80-gigabyte hard drive by dubbing off the air or from a camcorder or other source. And you can't copy an existing DVD — with or without copy protection — from the internal DVD drive. There's also no way to edit your recorded programs other than to delete them or to specify the order in which they're copied to a DVD.
But to compensate for the stripped-down DVD recorder, you get one very big, very important feature — TiVo. Humax has extended the intuitive, elegant menu system used to operate TiVo's wonderful program guide and hard-disk recorder to include both DVD playback and DVD recording.
Your high-tech household will love the ability to hook up the Humax to a home network and, through it, to the Internet. After downloading a server program from TiVo to your computer, you can use the home network connection to stream MP3 music from the computer through the DRT800, providing an easy way to get tunes from your “ripping station” PC into your home theater. The DRT800 can also show JPEG images from the PC (or from a picture CD) through its video outputs.
You can use the Internet connection further to download TiVo program-guide information, which can be a lot faster than a phone connection. (But you still have to program the DRT800 initially through a phone connection.) The TiVo service also offers some music programming for streaming (but not recording) through the Humax — a taste of things to come? Very cool.
SETUP Getting any TiVo device up and running is time-consuming but pretty straightforward. First off, you need a phone jack and a credit card. You call TiVo and subscribe to the service, then connect the recorder to the phone jack, direct it to dial up TiVo, and wait for it to download the program guide — an unusual procedure for home theater gear. But the process is nearly idiot-proof thanks to the guided setup menus and the plain-English manual.
Connecting the Humax to a home network can be easy or hard, depending on whether you use a wired or wireless hookup and whether your computer can automatically recognize the DRT800 and perform the setup routine for you. Using a $30 TiVo-recommended USB-to-Ethernet adapter, I had no problems getting our office network to recognize the Humax for music playback and photo viewing. But the recorder couldn't download program data from TiVo, possibly because of firewalls.
OPERATION The Humax works like every other TiVo-equipped DVD recorder I've tested: with blissful simplicity. TiVo is easily the best thought-out system for selecting and scheduling live TV programs to be recorded, and the DRT800 supplies all the familiar and formidable TiVo tools. You can search for specific types of programs to record (such as all karate matches) or obtain a Season Pass to automatically record all the episodes of, say, Alias, regardless of when and where they air. You also get a choice of four modes that trade off recording time on a blank DVD for improved picture quality: Basic (6 hours), Medium (4 hours), High (2 hours), and Best (1 hour).
Humax's extension of the TiVo menu system and remote control to DVD makes dubbing and even playing movie DVDs more enjoyable. Dubbing from the hard disk, especially, worked like a charm. Copying is done at high speed, with the processing time dependent on the quality of the hard-disk recording and whether you're using a blank DVD-R or DVD-RW.
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Even if you use a DVD-RW, the recording will be a “finalized” disc in the widely compatible Video format, not the editable VR format. And for any shows originally recorded using TiVo's program guide, the DRT800 will automatically place an impressive menu system on your recorded DVD using TiVo graphics and including a short synopsis, the original air date, a program rating, and program categories. For example, a dub of Nova from PBS was labeled “Anthology, Science” and rated TV-G. This feature is likely to be very helpful if you amass a lot of keeper discs.
BOTTOM LINE Humax might have sacrificed some editing features in the DRT800, but it was a smart move since studies show that most people never edit their programs, either on hard disk or when they transfer them to DVD. If you're one of them, the DRT800's elegance and ease of use should make it pretty much irresistible.
In the Lab
DVD-VIDEO PERFORMANCE
Maximum-white level error
(composite) ............................................................ 0/0 IRE
Setup level (composite) .......................................... 0 IRE
Onscreen horizontal resolution .................... 540 lines
Horizontal luminance response
(progressive-scan, re level at 2 MHz)
6/8/10 MHz ...................................... +0.25/+0.25/±0 dB
12/13.5 MHz ............................................... –1.1/–2.5 dB
In-player letterboxing .............................................. good
The Humax DRT800's performance was in line with what we've come to expect from well-designed DVD players and recorders. Resolution was fine for DVD movies, as was progressive-scan performance for material that originated as film, with no color smearing or jagged diagonals. As often happens, material from video sources — like concert videos — looked a bit rougher in progressive-scan playback, especially on diagonal edges.
In recording, I got essentially identical performance from the TiVo hard drive and DVDs dubbed from hard-disk programs. The Humax, like every other DVD recorder I've tested, halves its horizontal resolution (from 540 lines to approximately 270 lines) in its two “slowest” recording modes (Medium and Basic). But unlike many other recorders, the Humax preserved vertical resolution even in Basic mode, with no jerkiness on moving objects. Of course, the tradeoff is the increased visibility of encoding artifacts like “mosquito” noise (a fuzzy “busyness” around the borders of objects). Humax recommends using the Basic mode only for recording talk shows.