You know a recording medium is going in or out of fashion when you can’t find any blanks on the store shelves. Such a revelation hit me in the aisle for blank DVDs and CDs at a Best Buy here in New York City. There were shelf labels for all five recordable DVD formats — DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, DVD+RW, and DVD-RAM — but precious few of the discs. Yet unlike, say, the shelf for blank Beta videocassettes, the DVD shelves were being restocked with blanks from a variety of manufacturers even as I stood there — a sure sign that, at least in the Big Apple, DVD recorders are here to stay.
Phillips DVDR 80
This isn’t too surprising. DVD recorders are a marvelous replacement for the aging VCR, with far better picture and sound quality than even the best S-VHS machines. Any DVD recorder’s editing capabilities are superior to those of a standalone VCR, letting you easily remove commercials from TV shows recorded off-air or off-cable, and with no loss of quality. They also let you access any recording using the same rapid cueing features you use when playing DVD movies.
In case you haven’t heard, there’s a format “war” raging among the five recordable formats, and since each brings something special to the medium, capitulation by any of them seems unlikely anytime soon. The record-once DVD-R and DVD+R formats have the most universal playback compatibility, meaning that they’ll play on nearly all conventional DVD players and in computer DVD drives. DVD+RW also claims wide compatibility, while DVD-RW supports very flexible editing of recordings made in its special VR mode and, in the Video mode, produces discs that are far more widely compatible with older players. DVD-RAM also supports high-precision editing and, with its ability to quickly access data, can even perform some of the simultaneous record/play tricks popularized by TiVo and ReplayTV video hard-disk recorders (HDRs).
Like HDRs, DVD recorders have different recording “modes” that are similar to VHS’s multiple tape speeds. In selecting a recording mode you trade off picture quality for recording time. All of the different disc formats offer a high-quality mode that will give you 1 hour on a standard, single-sided 4.7-gigabyte (GB) DVD blank — and, as you’ll soon see, some machines have modes that can cram up to 8 hours per disc.
Between them, the three recorders reviewed here cover all of the DVD formats, sometimes in interesting combinations. The Panasonic DMR-E60 ($600, recording on DVD-RAM and DVD-R), the Philips DVDR 80 ($700, DVD+R/RW), and the Sony RDR-GX7 ($800, DVD+RW and DVD-R/RW) bring an immense degree of control and flexibility to video recording. And all three recorders are also fine DVD players. Chances are that one of these recorders has the mix of features and flexibility you’re looking for.
Deal-Making Features
You can choose a DVD recorder based on its features, but you’re better off first deciding which format is best for you (there is no “universal” recordable DVD format) and then narrowing the list to machines that record in that format. Make your final choice based on whatever especially desirable capabilities or convenience features a recorder has that the others don’t.
One excellent example of a feature that sets a deck apart is the Philips DVDR 80’s facilities for off-air/cable timer recording. While all three decks can record at times you set manually as well as make timer recordings controlled by the VCR Plus+ system familiar from VCRs and HDRs, only the Philips has Guide Plus+, a free interactive program guide that lists all the programs available via cable in your area. You use your remote to page through the onscreen program listings and select a show to either watch or schedule for recording.
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PHILIPS DVDR 80 |
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| DIMENSIONS 17
1/8 inches wide, 3 inches high, 13 1/4 inches deep WEIGHT 8 3/4 pounds PRICE $700 MANUFACTURER Philips USA, Dept. S&V, 64 Perimeter Center E., Atlanta, GA 30346; www.philipsusa.com; 800-531-0039 |
Guide Plus+ uses a supplied infrared (IR) “blaster” to send codes to your cable box so you can automatically record shows on different cable channels. This is where the Philips deck’s 8-hour mode comes in handy (the others top out at 6 hours). The Panasonic and Sony lack cable-box control, so changing channels during unattended recording is difficult unless your cable box will do this for you.
Among these recorders, only Panasonic’s DMR-E60 can handle JPEG-format pictures from digital still cameras, displaying them either individually or in a slide show. The images can be accessed from either a Secure Digital (SD) flash-memory card inserted into a front-panel slot or from a different type of card using a PC Card adapter (the larger PC Card slot is next to the SD slot). Pictures from either source can be copied into folders on DVD-RAM discs, and slide shows can be run directly from the cards or the DVD copies. The Panasonic can’t handle JPEG files recorded on CD-R/RW, however, a function many inexpensive DVD players now provide.
While we’re talking about missing functions, the Sony RDR-GX7 can’t play MP3 sound files, unlike the Panasonic and Philips recorders and just about every DVD player we’ve reviewed in the last year — a truly puzzling omission. And none of the recorders burns audio CDs, though they all read them.
The DVD-RAM format, supported by the Panasonic, allows for versatile editing functions, but it’s the least compatible recordable DVD system. The recorder’s ability to burn DVD-Rs makes up for this somewhat, and every new Panasonic DVD player can play RAM discs. Because the DVD-RAM format allows for reading and writing DVD data faster than “real time,” the DMR-E60 has some useful TiVo-like functions such as playing from the start of the program being recorded or recording a program while you view a previous recording.
All three recorders here have a fourth, very important feature. Hidden behind a flip-down panel on all of them is a FireWire (a/k/a i.Link or IEEE 1394) input connector for digital dubs of DV (or Digital8) camcorder tapes. Short of computer-based editing, using these inputs is the purest way to get your camcorder footage onto a DVD. The Sony and Panasonic decks automatically insert markers into the dubbed footage at scene changes (where the camcorder was stopped or paused), which can be extremely useful in editing.
Controlled Dubbing
Sony’s RDR-GX7 goes much further than the other two recorders in DV-dubbing control. You can actually do all your editing before burning a DVD by using the Program Edit function to select scenes on the DV tape. Using onscreen menus and the remote control, you can then change the order of the scenes and adjust their start and stop locations. Once you’re satisfied with the edit, you can burn a DVD — at which time the Sony recorder takes control of the process as it copies the selected scenes in the desired order onto disc. Both Sony’s Program Edit and One Touch Dub feature for copying a whole DV tape work with all the flavors of recordable DVD that the recorder handles.
Sony RDR-GX7
Sony’s Advanced Program Edit function is an even greater leap toward computer-like editing. After it copies the entire contents of a DV tape onto a DVD-RW (in the editable VR mode), the recorder’s editing features come into play, enabling much more rapid cueing than is possible with DV tape. The editing commands are memorized in a playlist on the DVD-RW, together with the complete original footage, permitting self-contained playback of the edited program in VR format from the disc on any DVD-RW player.
But the tape-cueing and editing commands can also be memorized as a “DV/ DV8 edit list” that — and this is the important part — is stored in the DVD recorder. Up to 20 edit lists, each containing up to 50 scenes, can be saved at a time. In-recorder storage allows you to make multiple copies of an edited program without having to repeatedly “bounce” the signal between the DVD recorder and the camcorder.
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Sony RDR-GX7 |
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DIMENSIONS 17 inches wide, 3 1/2 inches high, 15 inches deep WEIGHT 12 5/8 pounds PRICE $800 MANUFACTURER Sony Electronics, Dept. S&V, One Sony Dr., Park Ridge, NJ 07656; www.sonystyle.com; 800-222-7669 |
To make copies of the edited footage, you insert the tape containing the original footage into the camcorder and select the matching edit list stored in the Sony recorder, which again takes control of the dub. With the other two machines, you can only copy an edited DVD by playing it back into the recorder from a separate DVD player, which can degrade the quality of the copy. With Sony’s approach, you can conveniently make as many copies as you want directly from the original tape without having to worry about signal degradation.
Sony’s Advanced Program Editing function is about as far as a DVD recorder without an internal hard-disk drive can go in approaching the quality and flexibility of computer-based video editing. Being restricted to using DVD-RW discs when making an edit list is significant, since it shows that DVD+RW, although erasable, isn’t quite as versatile as DVD-RW’s VR mode. Indeed, the editing abilities of the Philips recorder, which takes only DVD+R/ RW discs, and of the Sony recorder when using DVD+RWs, are pretty basic by comparison. But they’re more than sufficient for doing what’s likely to be the most popular editing job — cutting out commercials.
The Learning Curve
The table (click here for PDF) listing each recorder’s functions, including editing procedures and capabilities, related to the disc formats hasn’t changed much from the one for our first DVD-recorder comparison nearly two years ago. Editing DVD-RW in VR mode and DVD-RAM is more complex than editing DVD+RW or DVD-RW in video mode, but it’s also more versatile. Editing the write-once DVD+R and DVD-R discs is simpler but offers even less versatility.
Panasonic DMR-E60
Any kind of editing on a DVD recorder can involve a lot of button pushing. We don’t have the space to cover the nitty-gritty of the procedures here, but that should take second-billing to the types of edits you can do anyway. The best way to familiarize yourself with these procedures and other features is to download the manuals for the recorders, which are usually available on the manufacturers’ Web sites. If you’re willing to slog through the mass of material, it’ll save you a lot of head-scratching later when you discover you can’t do something you thought you could. It’ll also help you make the right decisions about which format to use for what job — for instance, using the inexpensive DVD-R or DVD+R discs for permanent storage and DVD+RW, DVD-RW, or DVD-RAM for temporary storage or editing.
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Panasonic DMR-E60 |
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DIMENSIONS 17 inches wide, 3 inches high, 11 1/4 inches deep WEIGHT 8 1/2 pounds PRICE $600 MANUFACTURER Panasonic Consumer Electronics, Dept. S&V, One Panasonic Way, Secaucus, NJ 07094; www.panasonic.com; 800-211-7262 |
If you want to edit DV/Digital8 camcorder footage without buying a computer or learning computer-based video editing, the Sony RDR-GX7 has some unique powers, at least among this year’s models. If you’re more interested in compiling extensive archives of broadcasts and cablecasts or are a heavy-duty time-shifter, the Philips DVDR 80, with its channel-changing IR blaster and easy-to-use program guide, is the way to go. The Panasonic DMR-E60 makes it easy to display slide shows of digital still-camera photos on your home theater system and offers an interesting array of TiVo-like features as well. All three models show that DVD recorders are becoming more versatile as their prices, and the prices of blank discs, come steadily down. But that’s business as usual in high-tech electronics.
PDF: Features Checklist
PDF: Recording/Editing options
| In the Lab | ||
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All three recorders were fine DVD players as indicated by our standard series of lab tests. But I was surprised to find that the Panasonic’s progressive-scan component-video output had a moderate case of the color-smearing chroma-upsampling “bug,” since other Panasonic DVD players we’ve tested haven’t had this problem.
Used as recorders, these three machines were pretty well matched in video and especially audio performance. All use two-channel Dolby Digital encoding for the audio, and all of the encoders do a good job (the Panasonic also records two-channel PCM in its highest-quality recording mode). So for nearly all typical program material, such as off-air and home-camcorder footage, audio quality will never be an issue. In fact, you could use any of these machines as an audio-only (stereo) recorder and get very long recording times. Since all three models use the same stereo Dolby Digital data rate for all video recording modes, their audio performance doesn’t change when you select the optimum mode for your recording requirements. Video performance is another story. With each of these recorders it changed, sometimes dramatically, as I switched recording mode, becoming progressively worse as the maximum recording time on a disc increased. That’s because DVD recorders employ MPEG data compression to record video. As the amount of compression increases (or the recorded bit rate decreases, which is the same thing), you’re likely to see encoding “artifacts” — unrealistic-looking defects in the picture — like traces of the rectangular building blocks that make up an MPEG-encoded picture even in scenes where there are no straight lines (“blocking” or “macroblocking”). To obtain their extremely long recording times, all three machines decrease the encoding bit rate and at some point shift to something substantially less than a full 720 x 480-pixel DVD image. This was clearly revealed by our record/playback resolution tests. The Panasonic and Sony models at their 4-hour mode and the Philips at its 2 1/2-hour mode record only every other horizontal pixel, resulting in a horizontal resolution of around 260 lines, a little less than half the 540 lines of a standard DVD. What you see is a distinctly softer-than-usual image. As you increase recording time further, each deck will at some point record only every other vertical pixel, halving the vertical resolution. The Panasonic and Sony recorders used this type of encoding in their 6-hour modes. The Philips didn’t resort to this until its 8-hour mode, but with a bit rate of around 1.2 megabits per second, the picture was so distorted that it was close to unwatchable for all but the simplest video material, like talking-head news shows. In their top-quality modes (usually 1 to 2 hours maximum recording time), however, all three machines delivered full 540-line DVD resolution and clean images free from obvious blocking and other artifacts with the vast majority of program material. The Panasonic was slightly better than the other two machines at recording our acid-test DV camcorder fountain footage (see picture), which seems to be impossible to encode without visual blemishes at even the highest DVD bit rate, much less any mode longer than 2 hours. But even the visibility of the artifacts produced by the Sony and Philips recorders on this footage can vary depending on whether the machine being used to play the recorded disc has special MPEG playback noise-reduction features, especially for “block noise.” Both the Panasonic and Sony decks have this and other MPEG noise-reduction features, which noticeably reduced the visible blocking in the fountain scenes when I turned them on. |
