The players are in position, and the pieces are now on the board. But this is not a chess game, and the stakes are even higher than in the richest of Grand Master tournaments. This is the beginning of another video-recorder format war, but unlike the VHS vs. Beta conflict of the late 1970s and early ’80s, there are three competing formats. And this time we’re talking DVD, the hottest home-entertainment format ever, not videotape.

With DVD recorders from Philips and Pioneer recently joining the second-generation deck that Panasonic brought to market late last summer (see review in October 2001), we were able to round up decks representing the new rewritable formats and compare them in each of several key areas: ease of use, editing, video quality, and DVD-player compatibility. (There’s also the nonerasable DVD-R format, which two of the decks can record in and all three can play back.) The DVD-RAM and DVD-RW formats, both of which are endorsed by the DVD Forum trade association, are represented by Panasonic’s DMR-E20 ($1,500) and Pioneer’s Elite series DVR-7000 ($2,000), respectively, while the “renegade” DVD+RW format is represented by the Philips DVDR 1000 ($1,999). It seems likely that one or more of these three formats will eventually replace VHS tape, which is long overdue for retirement.

Why Recordable DVD?
These three machines can indeed be thought of as VCRs that use optical discs instead of tapes. In addition to playing prerecorded DVD movies, all have a timer and a stereo TV tuner for recording broadcasts or cablecasts as well as a set of front-panel A/V inputs for dubbing camcorder footage to disc. But thinking of these recorders as glorified VCRs may blind you to their important advantages:

While this list might suggest that these machines are pretty much the same except for the format incompatibility, that would be a gross oversimplification. As you’ll see, there are differences both in the recording/editing facilities they offer and in their video and audio performance.


Features Checklist
Recording/Editing Options
In The Lab
Showing Their True Stripes
           

Clarifying the Lingo
Each company uses confusingly different terminology to describe identical or very similar features or capabilities. We’ve tried to standardize the terminology as much as possible in compiling the “Features Checklist” and “Record/Edit Options” table to make them as useful as possible. For example, Panasonic calls the recording you get when you press record, let it run for a while, and then hit stop a “program,” while both Philips and Pioneer call it a “title.” We’ve adopted the latter term.

We also had to come up with a standard term for the signal format each of these machines use to create an erasable recording that’s playable in a standard DVD-Video player. (The nonerasable DVD-R format is also supposed to be compatible with most standard players.) The one we’ve settled on, since each manufacturer calls it something different, is “DVD-V.”

We’re also using the term “recording mode” for the equivalent of tape speed on a VCR. Each recorder delivers its best recording quality in its 1-hour mode, which gives a maximum recording time of 1 hour on a single-sided 4.7-gigabyte blank disc.

Cracking the Books
While many pages of the owner’s manuals for these recorders are devoted to VCR-like functions, you also get page after page after page devoted to editing functions ranging from the mundane (naming a disc or a title) to the exotic (playlist editing). Figuring out the manuals is far more difficult than actually using these recorders.

In terms of sheer usability, the Philips ranks first, but only by default because its editing functions are far simpler than those provided by the other two recorders. On the other hand, its manual leaves out a few important details, including what happens when you simply feed a video signal through the machine, from either an external source or the built-in TV tuner, without recording it. The video undergoes an MPEG encode/decode cycle before it emerges æ which not only degrades the resolution but also adds MPEG-encoding artifacts!

Worse is that the picture quality you get depends on the recording mode that’s selected, even if you’re not recording! If you make a long recording and leave the Philips in its 4-hour mode, you can expect some pretty bad-looking pass-through video. Unfortunately, changing the machine to its far better looking 1- or 2-hour modes isn’t easy. The Panasonic and Pioneer decks have Speed Change buttons on their remote controls, but the Philips buries this fundamental operating control deep within the setup menu! It takes at least a dozen pushes of the remote’s menu-navigation buttons to change the recording mode.

Not that the Panasonic or Pioneer decks are paragons of user-friendliness. Both are considerably more complicated to operate than the Philips, especially if you want to edit the recordings you make. On the other hand, as you can see from the tables on these pages, both decks do offer more features than the Philips.

           

The Pioneer is the more confusing of the two to operate because it offers so many recording choices. Besides choosing between DVD-R (write-once) and DVD-RW (rewritable) blank discs, you have to select between making a recording compatible with standard players (which we call DVD-V format) and a VR format recording, which will play only on a DVD-RW recorder or a compatible player. If you choose DVD-V, you then select the 1-hour or 2-hour mode, and you’re done. But if you choose VR format, you then have to choose between VR-SP (2 hours maximum) and VR-MN (1 to 6 hours); if you choose MN, you get to select a maximum time from Level 1 to Level 32.

All these choices, of course, give you a high degree of flexibility, particularly in the ability to make finely gauged tradeoffs of recording time for picture quality using the 32-step VR-MN format. Furthermore, the Pioneer is the only machine that offers picture-quality controls on both the inputs and outputs æ it’s also the only deck in the group with a bidirectional FireWire (a.k.a. IEEE 1394 or i.Link) connection. The Panasonic’s picture controls affect output only, and it doesn’t have a FireWire connector. The Philips has no picture-quality controls, and its FireWire port is input only, which means you can’t “bounce” material in digital form back and forth between recordable disc and tape or between two DVD recorders without “dropping” into analog.

Editing for Dummies
The editing features also vary considerably from deck to deck. Again the Philips is the odd man out, offering only the ability to define chapters within a title and to “hide” selected chapters during playback. On the other hand, those functions are exactly what you’d need to excise the commercials from a recording of a broadcast æ and they’re also probably the most advanced editing functions most people will ever use.

The Panasonic and Pioneer decks provide two different methods of editing. The first, which we call “title editing” in our table, includes things like deletions or erasures that actually change what’s recorded on the disc. If you want to preserve a recording while editing it for playback, you’d use “playlist editing” instead. Playlists are sets of cueing instructions stored on the disc and carried out during playback. To edit a playlist, you mark start and stop points to identify which segments are to be played or skipped, and in what order they will appear. The beauty of playlist editing is that it changes only the deck’s instructions æ not the recorded program.

The only way to move a recorded segment out of its original order with the Panasonic and Pioneer decks is through playlist editing. Their editing features are well suited for deleting commercials from recorded broadcasts and for creating programs of highlights from camcorder footage, not for anything much more elaborate. The editing features of the Philips can’t change the playback order of segments.

           

Ironically, considering the advanced technology in play here, you cannot create as sophisticated an edited work even with the Pioneer or Panasonic deck as you can with a couple of editing-friendly VCRs and an editing controller, let alone a full-blown computer-based editing system. In addition, each edit you make may be accompanied by a freeze frame and a slight delay as the recorder recues the disc, and the edit points may shift slightly from where you put them.

Video Fine Points
Here’s where video Grand Masters are separated from the pack, since the real-time MPEG-2 video encoding performed by DVD recorders is probably the most mathematically complex operation you’ll find in any piece of consumer-electronics gear.

You might have noticed that I didn’t list superior video quality as a general advantage of recordable DVDs over VCRs. That’s because the results you get depend not only on the recorder but on how it’s used. As you increase maximum recording time by switching through each recorder’s various “modes” (1-hour, 2-hour, and so on), you eventually decrease resolution to approximately VHS quality (see “In the Lab”) while increasing MPEG encoding artifacts, which further diminish picture quality. MPEG artifacts appear very different from VCR signal noise, and in the longer recording modes (3 to 4 hours and up) they look worse to me than the tape noise you get with VHS running at LP and EP speeds.

For example, one of the most noticeable MPEG artifacts is “macroblocking,” in which you can see the blocklike chunks into which the picture is divided for processing. Macroblocking is a static phenomenon — the blocks don’t move from frame to frame, which can make them more noticeable than tape noise, which is random from frame to frame and appears as increased graininess. The upshot: if you care about video quality, you probably shouldn’t use recording modes longer than 2 hours with any of these decks.

But even using each recorder’s (top) 1-hour mode, don’t expect to get image quality equaling that of a well-mastered commercial DVD. A sharp-eyed viewer with lots of experience in looking for MPEG-encoding artifacts wouldn’t have trouble spotting the difference between a recordable-DVD copy of a broadcast or camcorder footage and a standard DVD. Nonetheless, the Panasonic and Pioneer recorders made recordings in their 1-hour modes that came very close to being indistinguishable from our 30-minute master MiniDV-format test recording (see “Seeing Their True Stripes,” right). The recording made on the Philips in its 1-hour mode was not quite as good. In particular, macroblocking was sometimes visible, and the picture had a graininess that was not apparent in the master or in the other two dubs. In the longer recording modes (3 and 4 hours), the performance gap narrowed, but the Philips still lagged behind the Panasonic and Pioneer decks in these respects.

   

Compatibility Issues
I think too much has been made about the playback compatibility of the various recordable-DVD formats in standard home DVD players. Compatibility with computer DVD-ROM drives is of far greater practical importance and has many significant ramifications, especially for editing. Nonetheless, all three recorders reviewed here can burn discs that are widely compatible — the Panasonic and Pioneer on DVD-R blanks, Philips on its “native” DVD+RW format. But each manual has a caveat somewhere to the effect that not all “compatible” discs made in that machine will play in all DVD players.

I certainly found this to be true with a DVD+RW made in the Philips deck, which played on six out of eight players we tried. The DVD+RW also played in the two computer DVD-ROM drives I tried æ until I finalized the disc and used the processing option that’s intended to increase its playback compatibility! Neither DVD-RAM nor DVD-RW discs are compatible with normal DVD players (except for Pioneer models, which play DVD-RWs, and some newer Panasonic models that play DVD-RAMs), but I had no problem playing write-once DVD-R discs recorded on either the Pioneer or the Panasonic on all the players and drives I had available.

Still Anybody’s Game
Panasonic
DMR-E20
DIMENSIONS 17 inches wide, 43/4
inches high, 13 7/8 inches deep
WEIGHT 12 3/4 pounds
PRICE $1,500
MANUFACTURER Panasonic Consumer Electronics, One Panasonic Way, Secaucus, NJ 07094
www.panasonic.com
800-222-4213

Philips

DVDR 1000
DIMENSIONS 20 inches wide, 8 1/4
inches high, 15 3/4 inches deep
WEIGHT 22 pounds
PRICE $1,999
MANUFACTURER Philips Electronics, 64 Perimeter Center E., Atlanta, GA 30346-6401
www.philips.com
800-531-0039

Pioneer

Elite DVR-7000
DIMENSIONS 16 1/2 inches wide,
4 1/4 inches high, 14 inches deep
WEIGHT 12 pounds
PRICE $2,000
MANUFACTURER Pioneer Electronics USA, 2265 E. 220th St., Long Beach, CA 90810
www.pioneerelectronics.com
800-746-6337

It’s far too early to declare a winner in the recordable-DVD format war. Such a declaration should certainly not be attempted on the basis of our tests of these three early machines. There’s no telling what tricks each format may have up its sleeves. The conclusion that can be drawn here is the same kind we often end up with in comparisons of components with widely varying capabilities: the model that’s right for you will depend on what you’re looking for.

If ease of use is of primary importance, the Philips DVDR 1000 is the hands-down winner, although selecting the recording mode is much too complicated. This is the recorder that behaves most like a VCR, making DVDs instead of tapes. You don’t have to worry about which recording format or disc type to use or about finalizing your discs, and the discs you make should play on many regular DVD players.

If it’s the finer points of image quality you’re most concerned about, Pioneer’s DVR-7000 gets the nod. While its MPEG encoding is about equal to the Panasonic’s when they’re compared using identical recording modes, the Pioneer lets you really fine-tune the video encoding to optimize picture quality for a given program duration. And it’s the only player in this group that has a bidirectional FireWire connector, which is essential for bouncing signals between recorders with minimal loss of quality. On the downside, the Pioneer is the hardest machine to figure out, if not to use, because of the many different disc types and formats it can handle.

The Panasonic DMR-E20 provides excellent picture quality in its 1- and 2-hour modes, and in terms of ease of use, it stands squarely between the Philips and Pioneer. It’s also the only one of the three that lets you play back a program from the start while it’s still recording (thanks to its Time Slip feature), which increases its appeal as a time-shifting device. Too bad it doesn’t have a FireWire connector.

Even though there’s no clear-cut winner among these three models, I’m still very excited by the arrival of rewritable DVD recorders. If it were up to me, I’d let a couple of recorder generations go by before declaring which format is technically superior. Trouble is, by then the marketplace may have already chosen a winner. Let’s hope that this time the decision is made for the right reasons, unlike what happened in the VCR format war.