Like swimmers in some Darwinian gene pool, DVD recorders are quickly mutating to fill every possible niche. Yet as they evolve, you can count on finding a core set of features in most decks — a TV tuner, a VCR-style timer, and a handful of recording “modes” that let you trade picture quality for playback time. Of course, progressive component-video outputs and compatibility with MP3 music and JPEG photo files are also standard.
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What We Think
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| Lite-On LVW-1105HC |
Samsung DVD-TR520 |
RCA DRC8060N |
| It's short on editing chops and lacks a display, but this budget deck still does most everything else as well as any other recorder. | High-speed dubbing aside, its edit functions are less than elegant and its two disc trays less useful than you might think. | Effective commercial zapping and unusually good progressive-scan video quality prove to be a winning combination. |
The three recorders tested here are all fairly basic models, with only manual recording (no VCR Plus+ programming, much less an onscreen programming guide) and no infrared “blaster” to control your cable box. But along with the core feature set described above, each offers its own unique twist. Lite-On’s LVW-1105HC ($129) boasts a remarkably low price, and though it lacks the traditional front-panel readout, it remains a very capable recorder. RCA has the first DVD recorder we’ve seen with an upconverting HDMI digital video output, the DRC8060N ($300), which also includes an outstanding commercial-skip feature. And Samsung’s take on DVD copying has led to the first dual-tray recorder, the DVD-TR520 ($450).
Regardless of its bells and whistles, we look for any DVD recorder to do two things well. One is to let you easily edit out commercials in your recordings. The other is to commit those recordings to disc with good video quality. Let’s see how this trio accomplished those tasks.
Lite-On
Less is more, or at least not less
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The Short Form
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| $129 / 11 x 2 x 10.5 IN / liteonit.com / 888-854-8366 |
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Plus
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| •Inexpensive. •Compact. •Good recording performance. •Simple to use. |
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Minus
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| •No way to edit out commercials. |
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Key Features
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| •Records on DVD+R/RW and DVD-R/RW •Plays JPEG, WMA, MP3, and MPEG-4 files |
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Test Bench
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| Recorded performance was nothing out of the ordinary, though the rare 3-hour LP mode was mostly free of encoding artifacts compared with the longer-playing modes. Progressive-component output was average quality, meaning that video-based content tended to have jaggies — where the diagonal edges of moving objects break up. But this is a typical fault of DVD players. Click here for full lab results |
Having no display allows the deck to be considerably smaller than other standalone recorders and gives it an unusually clean look. The only front-panel indicators are for power on/off, recording/playback, and timer-recording on/off. Essential feedback is provided by an onscreen display, of course, which is best called up using the Easy Guider button on the remote. This is a clever context-sensitive control that automatically guides you through menu choices according to the disc you’ve placed in the tray (depending on whether it’s prerecorded or recordable, write-once or erasable). I’ve encountered this control on previous Lite-On recorders, and it has always proved useful since it restricts your choices to whatever is immediately relevant. Other remote buttons call up more conventional menus, such as for setting up the machine. In all, I never missed the front-panel display except, ironically, for its traditional clock function!
With this recorder and its even less expensive near-twin, the LVW-1101HC (which lacks DVD-R/RW compatibility and the ability to play MPEG-4 files), Lite-On has demonstrated that you don’t really need front-panel feedback to successfully operate a simple DVD recorder.
REMOVING COMMERCIALS I quickly discovered that the downside of the LVW-1105HC's low price is that it won't let you edit your recordings, even on erasable discs. You get only rudimentary editing capabilities like naming or erasing titles, or protecting them from erasure. On many recorders, you can at least mark chapters, then hide or delete them — an effective way to eliminate annoying commericials from your favorite TV shows. But you can’t even do that on the LVW-1105HC. This makes it easy to use but ultimately less convenient than some of its pricier competition. Fortunately, the remote includes a commercial-skip button that lets you jump forward in 30-second increments while playing your discs. Keep it handy!
VIDEO PERFORMANCE Like all three decks reviewed here, the LVW-1105 provided excellent recording quality in its top two recording modes, which offer maximum disc playing times of 1 and 2 hours. And as with the other decks, image quality decreased as I moved beyond 2-hour capacity. The first thing to go was horizontal resolution, which was halved in the 3-hour LP mode. Despite the lack of resolution, though, this mode provided an unusually good tradeoff between image quality and maximum recording time, as there were relatively few of the digital artifacts common to the 4-hour LP modes in other recorders — things like “mosquito” noise (a roughness or "busyness" on object borders) and blocking (where the picture degrades into mosaic-like blocks). These were much more distracting in the Lite-On’s 4-hour EP mode, and the picture was pretty miserable looking by the time I got to the 6-hour mode, especially when there was motion. The other two recorders were just as bad in this mode.
As a DVD player, the Lite-On's video performance was about average. Progressive-scan conversion was typical, which is to say not bad but not terribly good, as evidenced by the usual "jaggies" that affect diagonals in video-based content (see "test bench").
BOTTOM LINE Lite-On has produced an easy-to-use DVD recorder that's best suited for simple off-air dubs or copies of camcorder footage. Best of all, it comes at a very attractive price for a good down-and-dirty burner. But if you want to remove commercials or mark chapters for easier navigation of your recordings, you'll have to look elsewhere.
Samsung
Two decks in one, almost
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The Short Form
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| $450 / 17 x 3.125 x 13.33 IN / samsung.com / 800-726-7864 |
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Plus
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| •Simple disc dubbing. •Easy manual commercial removal. |
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Minus
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| •Disc-to-disc dubbing limited to unprotected discs. •No chapter markers in recordings on erasable discs. |
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Key Features
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| •Dual-tray design to simplify disc copying •Full playlist editing for more complex productions •Records on DVD-R/RW and DVD-RAM discs |
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Test Bench
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| Recording quality was typical of most DVD recorders I’ve tested when compared mode by mode. Playback performance through the progressive-component output was a little below average, with jaggies on diagonal edges and a rolled-off luminance response. Click here for full lab results |
DISC DUBBING Now don't get any big ideas — this deck won't dub a copy-protected DVD, whether it's sitting in the player drawer or fed in from another player. Even if the disc you want to dub isn’t copy-protected, it also has to be a single-layer disc. But if a disc you want to copy meets these criteria — like some music and special-interest titles, for instance — you can use the DVD-TR520's Disc-Copy function to make a bit-perfect clone of the entire disc in a matter of minutes. I dubbed Jodeci’s Back to the Future: The Videos onto an 8x DVD-R in about 15 minutes, and the clone retained all the features of the original, including menus, extras, and Dolby Digital and DTS soundtracks.
The dual-tray design is best used to make quick copies of your home-grown titles, including DVDs produced on the DVD-TR520 itself. So Samsung also includes a Title-Selection menu that lets you choose, for example, just one or two individual home movies for copying from a disc holding several. You can also change the recording mode during a real-time (not high-speed) dub to maximize playing time on the copy. The Title-Selection system works only with home-recorded discs, however — neither commercial discs nor their clones can be dubbed this way.
REMOVING COMMERCIALS As with all DVD recorders, the DVD-TR520’s editing capabilities are most versatile when you use an erasable disc — in this case, DVD-RAM and DVD-RW (in VR mode, as opposed to the more widely playable Video mode). Both formats are treated identically by the deck — it doesn't offer any of the DVR-like simultaneous record/playback features found on other DVD-RAM recorders.
Deleting commercials was reasonably easy with both disc types using the Partial-Delete function. With it you can use the deck’s cueing controls to mark the beginning and end points of a commercial segment, which is then deleted using another menu button. But unlike similar systems with other recorders, Samsung’s leaves no residual chapter markers where the commercials were removed. After spending considerable time removing the commercials from a TV movie, you end up with a single long title that has no chapter divisions to help you cue up the portion you want.
You can, however, get the DVD-TR520 to automatically insert regularly spaced chapter marks on unerasable DVD-R discs, or on DVD-RWs in the Video recording mode. But you'll probably find the markers are much too widely spaced — 15 minutes apart — if you record in the high-capacity LP or EP modes.
The recorder does have full playlist editing for DVD-RAM and DVD-RW (VR) recordings so you can reorder program segments via a list of segment start/stop points that the player rapidly cues to. But as usual with playlist editing on standalone DVD recorders, the system is tedious to operate and far less versatile than even the most basic computer editing systems.
BOTTOM LINE Although its recording quality was fine (see "test bench"), many people won't have use for the Samsung's dual-tray design, and a deck with a hard drive would be a better choice at this price. But if you have a big library of home-brew DVDs to dub, the DVD-TR520 offers a unique solution.
RCA
A commercial success
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The Short Form
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| $300 / 17 x 2.5 x 11 IN / rca.com / 317-587-3000 |
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Plus
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| •Automatic commercial removal. •Good progressive-scan performance. •HDMI output. |
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Minus
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| •No playlist editing. |
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Key Features
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| •Automatically skips commercials •Records on DVD+R/RW discs •HDMI output upconverts to 720p or 1080i HDTV formats |
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Test Bench
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DVD recordings on the DRC8060N were average, including those made using its 4-hour LP and 6-hour EP modes. Like the Samsung, the RCA also has an 8-hour mode that didn't look good even on the stills of a Ken Burns documentary. Progressive-scan performance — especially from movie discs — was unusually good on both the HDMI and component-video outputs. |
REMOVING COMMERCIALS But I'm more excited about another unusual feature in the DRC8060N — its Commercial Advance feature, which automatically detects and hides commercials while you’re recording! This is a very slick update of a feature that was once available on some VCRs and ReplayTV DVRs.
For the most part, TV commercials are set off from the main program when both the sound and the picture rapidly fade to black (or silence) and remain muted for a moment — right before and just after the commercial segment. Commercial Advance automatically inserts chapter markers in these gaps and designates the resulting "chapters" as "hidden" so the commercials are skipped over during playback of your recorded DVD. Pretty clever.
The manual says Commercial Advance can be fooled if the broadcast doesn't conform to this fade-out/in behavior. I recorded a solid hour of Anderson Cooper 360º on CNN, and while the system retained the CNN promos seamlessly tacked onto the newscast, it effectively nixed 16 minutes of commercials. Most important, it didn’t screw up the program.
Should you decide you want to watch some of the commercials — Super Bowl fans take note — you can always "unhide" them via the manual-editing menu. Even then, you can still skip over them manually using the remote's chapter-advance button. And if the system makes a mistake in marking commercial segments, you can remove the bogus markers and insert your own — even hide the entire Super Bowl and keep just the commercials!
The upshot, however, is that this is all you get — the RCA's editing capabilities are limited to defining chapter segments and then hiding or unhiding them. That’s it. As usual with DVD+R/RW-only decks, there's no playlist editing to allow you to reorder program segments, as you might want to do with camcorder footage. Still, the combination of Commercial Advance and manual chapter editing is all that most users will ever need.
VIDEO PERFORMANCE DVD recordings on the DRC8060N were typical of today's DVD recorders, with excellent quality in the 2-hour mode and increasingly poorer performance in the higher-capacity modes (beware of any recorder's 8-hour mode). But its progressive-scan outputs (both HDMI and component video) were surprisingly clean, with far fewer jaggies than usual when playing video-originated material. In this regard, the RCA was much better than the average standalone DVD player.
BOTTOM LINE Add its unusually good progressive-scan performance to the extremely useful commercial-skip feature, and the RCA DRC8060N is a welcome addition to the ranks of basic DVD recorders and one we can highly recommend.
Lite-On LVW-1105HC
RECORD/PLAYBACK PERFORMANCE
All results for the progressive-component output. Test patterns were 4:3.
| Recording mode | HQ (1-hour/ DVD) |
SP (2 hours) | LP (3 hours) | EP (4 hours) | SLP (6 hours) |
| Video encoding | MPEG-2 | MPEG-2 | MPEG-2 | MPEG-2 | MPEG-1 |
| Recorded pixel count (horiz. x vert.) | 720 x 480 | 720 x 480 | 352 x 480 | 352 x 480 | 352 x 240 |
| Video bit rate with Avia resolution test pattern (megabits per second) | 9.22 Mbps | 4.62 Mbps | 2.98 Mbps | 2.1 Mbps | 1.33 Mbps |
| Onscreen resolution (lines, horiz. x vert.) | 540 x 480 | 540 x 480 | 260 x 480 | 260 x 480 | 260 x 240 |
| All Audio Encoding: 2-channel Dolby Digital All Audio bit rate (kilobits per second): 256 kbps |
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DVD PLAYBACK PERFORMANCE
All results for the progressive-component output. Test patterns were 16:9 widescreen except for onscreen resolution.
Vertical luminance response (re level at 100 lines)
200/300/400 lines: ±0/±0/±0 dB
Horizontal luminance response (re level at 2 MHz)
4/6/8/10 MHz: -0.63/-1.3/-2.0/-2.2 dB
12/13.5 MHz: -3.6/-4.6 dB
Onscreen resolution: 540 lines (4:3 image)
In-player letterboxing: good
Samsung DVD-TR520
RECORD/PLAYBACK PERFORMANCE
All results for the progressive-component output. Test patterns were 4:3.
| Recording mode | XP (1-hour/ DVD) |
SP (2 hours) | LP (4 hours) | EP (6 hours) | EP (8 hours) |
| Video encoding | MPEG-2 | MPEG-2 | MPEG-2 | MPEG-1 | MPEG-1 |
| Recorded pixel count (horiz. x vert.) | 720 x 480 | 720 x 480 | 352 x 480 | 352 x 240 | 352 x 240 |
| Video bit rate with Avia resolution test pattern (megabits per second) | 8.0 Mbps | 8.0 Mbps | 3.9 Mbps | 3.0 Mbps | 3.0 Mbps |
| Onscreen resolution (lines, horiz. x vert.) | 540 x 480 | 540 x 480 | 260 x 480 | 260 x 240 | 260 x 240 |
| All Audio Encoding: 2-channel Dolby Digital All Audio bit rate (kilobits per second): 256 kbps |
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DVD PLAYBACK PERFORMANCE
All results for the progressive-component output. Test patterns were 16:9 widescreen except for onscreen resolution.
Vertical luminance response (re level at 100 lines)
200/300/400 lines: ±0/±0/±0 dB
Horizontal luminance response (see notes)
4/6/8/10 MHz: -0.45/-1.6/-3.7/-6.9 dB
12/13.5 Mhz: -11/-13 dB
Onscreen resolution: 540 lines (4:3 image)
In-player letterboxing: good
RCA DRC8060N
RECORD/PLAYBACK PERFORMANCE
All results for the progressive-component output. Test patterns were 4:3.
| Recording mode | 1 Best (1-hour/ DVD) |
2 High (2 hours) | 3 Good (3 hours) | 4 Normal (4 hours) | 5 Basic (6 hours) | 6 Low (8 hours) |
| Recorded pixel count (horiz. x vert.) | 720 x 480 | 720 x 480 | 352 x 480 | 352 x 480 | 352 x 480 | 352 x 480 |
| Video bit rate with Avia resolution test pattern (megabits per second) | 8.8 Mbps | 4.5 Mbps | 3.0 Mbps | 2.2 Mbps | 1.4 Mbps | 1.0 Mbps |
| Onscreen resolution (lines, horiz. x vert.) | 540 x 480 | 540 x 480 | 260 x 480 | 260 x 480 | 260 x 240 | 260 x 480 |
| Audio bit rate (kilobits per second) | 256 kbps | 256 kbps | 256 kbps | 192 kbps | 192 kbps | 192 kbps |
| All Video Encoding: MPEG-2 All Audio Encoding: 2-channel Dolby Digital |
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DVD PLAYBACK PERFORMANCE
All results for the progressive-component output. Test patterns were 16:9 widescreen except for onscreen resolution.
Vertical luminance response (re level at 100 lines)
200/300/400 lines: ±0/±0/±0 dB
Horizontal luminance response (re level at 2 MHz)
4/6/8/10 MHz: -0.18/-0.35/-0.72/-1.1 dB
12/13.5 Mhz: -2.4/-3.2 dB
Onscreen resolution: 540 lines (4:3 image)
In-player letterboxing: good
Recording quality for these DVD recorders was typical of the recorders we've tested, with comparable performance for modes offering the same maximum recording times. Beware of the highest-capacity modes of the Lite-On and the Samsung since they employ MPEG-1 encoding, which gives jerky motion reproduction. And though the RCA uses MPEG-2 encoding for its 8-hour mode and maintains smooth motion reproduction, the picture is as artifact-ridden as Samsung's - basically unwatchable for anything but still images. The 3-hour modes of the Lite-On and RCA produce the best tradeoff between recording time and picture quality for typical off-air recording jobs. Use each machine's 1-hour mode for the most critical dubs.
With a couple of exceptions, DVD movie playback was also about average. The unusual rolloff in luminance response of the Samsung's progressive output made it look slightly softer than either of the other machines. Interestingly, its interlaced component-video output was just fine (down less than a half decibel at 13.5 MHz). If you have a fixed-pixel TV (a microdisplay rear projector or a flat-panel TV), you might want to use the Samsung's interlaced output and hope your TV maintains luminance response while it performs the necessary interlaced-to-progressive conversion. That process was done in typical fashion by the Lite-On and Samsung recorders, with the usual result: "jaggies," or jagged diagonal edges, on material from video sources. The RCA was mostly free of this particular progressive-conversion artifact, which made it as pleasant to watch as it was to find such performance. Aside from the Samsung rolloff, all three players looked good with film material.
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