The Burning Mysteries of DVD Recorders (page 3)

A few DVD burners also include a built-in VHS video deck, combining a VCR with a DVD burner. For those who are short of space and want to copy their stacks of TV reruns or analog camcorder tapes, this is a useful solution. Still, it’s not very difficult to plug a VCR into the back of the burner, so this is only a matter of convenience.

Most DVD recorders have some sort of delayed recording ability that allows you to schedule programs for recording while you are away, exactly like your old VCR. Fortunately, modern user interfaces have improved and DVD recorders are often much easier to use than a VCR. Onscreen program guides, such as VCR Plus+, are a real help. Some have more complex programmability like DVRs have, including an IR blaster to control a connected satellite or digital cable receiver.

If your A/V receiver has a limited number of inputs, the ability to pass audio and video signals through the DVD recorder can be extremely handy. Ideally, the unit should be able to send them through even when in standby mode. The unit needs to be powered up to send sound and video information, but ideally, it needn’t be fully on, just in standby mode.

Some devices will allow you to record one program while watching another. At it’s most basic level, this means that the TV tuner can send a signal to the DVD disc for recording while you watch programming on another tuner. More complex DVR-style DVD recorders can sometimes use buffers and hard drives to pause and play live television while the program is being recorded. Sometimes this feature only works with certain types of media, such as DVD-RAM.

Upgradeable firmware is a hyper-geeky feature that future-proofs your recorder to some extent. All consumer electronics have software deep inside the machine. Theoretically, you can update this software, usually by downloading a small program, burning it to a CD, putting that CD in your DVD player and then following a few simple steps. Firmware updates usually improve the compatibility of the player/recorder with newer blank media formats and speeds. Welcome to 21st Century consumer electronics.

Ed Driscoll is a Silicon Valley-based freelance journalist who’s covered home theater and the media for the past decade.

Here is a survey of media costs from various sources (summer 2004). The lower price in the range is for OEM (generic) discs in quantities of 100, while the high price is what you might pay for one piece of branded media on the shelf at your local electronics store. Everything will have changed by the time you read this, but this should give you a rough idea of what is a reasonable price. Since DVD recorders only record at slower speeds, prices are based on the slowest speed discs we could find, which is often 4x.

DVD-R: $0.29 - $2.36
DVD-RW: $0.95 - $3.20
DVD+R: $0.43 - $2.48
DVD+RW: $0.73 - $4.38
Dual-Layer (+R): $3.49 - $12.00

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