Just before Christmas I bought a DVD recorder for my TV. I have TiVo and found that half of the space was taken up with stuff that has been saved for a year or more because I haven’t gotten around to saving it to a VHS tape… plus I hate VHS anymore since DVDs are so much better. I’d been putting off buying a DVD recorder because of the price, but I found one at Walmart for under $80 so I said Merry Christmas To Me and got it.
I’ve attempted to burn about 4 discs now and only 1 has been successful, which was just one 2 hour movie onto a disc. The others have been trying to record several tv shows onto a disc, and it will get through a few, and then halfway through one of them it starts spontaneously going “pause-rec-pause-rec-pause-rec” and then just says “disc error” and won’t do anything beyond that.
Grumble. It also has the worst remote ever. The thing is laid out like a calculator. Just a grid of identical rectangular buttons, labelled in tiny print, with a seemingly random layout. It takes me 15 seconds just to find “play” or “pause” every time. So I figure… I would consider buying a new one, and then selling this one on ebay or craigslist or something.
I don’t want to spend a lot of money on this, but I am getting money back from the gummint this year for my taxes, and if I can find a decent one under $150-200 or so I’m considering using some of my tax refund on that. (Hey, I have responsible, grown-up things [bills…ugh] to spend most of it on, but it would be nice to get something for myself as well.)
I decided I’d rather go with something that someone I know of has already had good experience with… so I figured… hey! Dopers! I’ll ask them!
So… anyone have a good one?
I’ve had my external Sony DVDirect for 10 months (happy thread), and I absolutely love it. I’m almost done transferring all of my home videos to DVD, and then I’m going to hook it up to the computer.
The price they show is $230, which is the same price I paid through Dellfor it and is also the same price currently being offered by Amazon.
I’ve had a couple of them over the last couple of years, so far only the one I have now works. I don’t remember the brand, but I do remember it cost over $200. Don’t go with the Magnavox, though I have a TV from them, I had three DVD recorders. Yes three, none worked right.
I have Toshiba’s large HD model. It was stickered at around $500, but we got a great deal on it around Boxing Day.
I love it. The only drawbacks are the “TV Guide” channel list diesn’t work with satellite (which I knew going in) and it has a bit of a lag sometimes from when I press the remote button to when the cursor moves on screen. Luckily, this never happens with the editing features or rec/pause…just if I’m putting in a lot of information lke naming titles or setting a manual timer.
Not to sound like a prick, but I surmise a good deal of the issues you had (disc errors, crappy remote) are probably closely related to the fact that you paid <$80 for it at WalMart.
Well yes, I think so too and that was kind of the whole point.
Yours sounds nice, but even a “great deal” on something that retails for $500 is going to be far, far out of my price range. But thanks anyway!
Have you tried using different discs? Might want to check out getting some -R and some +R, and from different manufacturers. You can usually get them in 5-packs for a reasonable price.
It’s more than what you stated as your price range, but you may want to take a look at today’s Woot anyway (link will bring up a different offer after midnight tonight).
The instructions specifically say to ONLY use +R or +RW discs.