Good, Economical DVD Player/Recorder - But nothing fancy
24/09/09 23:07 Pigeon Holed in:
DVD Players/RecordersNot a bad DVD Recorder. Plenty of inputs but the DVD-R might have some compatibility issues with old school DVD players...but then again, what DVD-Rs DON’T have issues with old school DVD players!?
Lite On LVW-5116GHC DVD Recorder I'm a videographer in Las Vegas and have need to convert raw footage from DV and DVCam to DVD all the time. I saw the liteon lvw-5115GHC at Costco and thought I would give it a try. I was impressed at how easy it is to set up and use and it has a firewire input and lots of rca inputs/outputs on back. It will probably be compatible with about anything you need to hook up to it.
The menu options are 'fairly' easy to use. It really takes the manual (which is very limited in its help) to find your way to the preferences. But once you do, the menus advance in logical format which even an 8 year old could follow.
I like that it allows for High Quality, Standard, Long Play, REALLY Long play compression which can allow you to get nearly 4-6 hours on a single DVD.
Here is the downer part. The final product (DVD) that it burns is sometimes finicky and will not play on certain DVD players and the standard quality is totally just 'standard' (2 hours max on Disc). I've also run into a problem of audio being out of sync with video on occasion with this machine. However, in Liteon's defense, most of the consumer grade recorders will be finicky on slightly older machines.
Overall the price was good, its easy to learn, I'm liking it so far.
The Bottom Line:
Pros: inexpensive, easy to learn, inputs outputs
Cons: dvd quality is inconsistent
If you need an inexpensive DVD recorder and don't need professional quality, give the Liteon a shot.
| Suggestion Of The Day:
Sony BDP S360 Blu-Ray Player
I own this particular player and thoroughly enjoy it. The picture is absolutely beautiful in 1080i OR 1080p. I chose to pick up the Sony because of compatibility concerns. The technology is still fairly new to most blu-ray disc manufacturers so we still have some kinks to work out with ALL Blu-Ray players. I like that this player has an ethernet port on the back of the unit that enables BD-Live capabilities and it also allows you to upgrade the firmware fairly easy.
I paid about $200 for mine on sale during Black Friday, after chasing around newspaper specials and whatnot. I would NOT recommend this buy method. PLEASE. Never again. There are a couple online stores that sell this unit pretty cheap. abt.com has this exact model for about $230
If you’re a diehard bargain shopper, like me, I found a
Sylvania Blu-Ray player at Kmart for about 150 bucks. It does 1080p as well.
Again, if you are into burning your own Blu-Ray movies, you can do that too. Here is an internal Sony Blu-Ray burner from Mwave. We’re still on the early side of this technology curve as well so the price on these dudes is still pretty high. To burn your own, you’re looking at about $360 for this burner, plus, you’ll need software as well. Check it out anyway, and give us a shout!
