2 stars

We (Mom, Dad, two kids) have owned this machine about a month and a half. It's our first DVD recorder and replaced a good quality DVD player that was about 7 years old. It's been a bit of a dissapointment.

Player- As a DVD player, it seems very robust and gives a good signal on our older TV. But it is a little pricey just for that. No complaints on the quality, but the remote button for "disk submenu" is tiny and hard to locate. You need this buton all the time for playback. It's annoying.

Tuner- One of the reasons we purchased this model was for the tuner. Our attempts to capture over the air HDTV were pretty sad. It may need a better antenna, but we could pull in very few stations for our area. Most of them were very unstable and pixillated. We got two sharp pictures for Spanish language channels. It did tune ok to the cable, but it's really slow to change channels. Painfully, mind bogglingly slow. Channel changing is an exercise in torture. So don't buy it for the tuner.

Recorder- It does record very sharp DVD's on all the advertised media in the XP and SP modes. Our experiments with LP and FR features were a little less sharp, but acceptable. Everything it records plays back on the machine fine without finalization.

But there is no editing available for DVD RW. You can add and delete "chapters" only on the DVD-RAM media. Target doesn't even stock this media, I found a lone few of these disks at Fry's.

You can't play it in another player without a finalization step. This is quite touchy on this machine for very standard media. We mostly have tried Memorex and HP brands. It refused to finalize a dual layer disk and turned 4 hours of recording into a junk disk in about 10 seconds. The recording was fine "unfinalized". It's been a bit twitchy about the others I have tried also. So, just never know what's going to happen. And the other machine we have doesn't recognize DVD-RAM, even when finalized. So the features that work only on DVD-RAM don't add much value for us.

The recorder's schedule menu is very reminiscent of my 1980's RCA VCR. Somewhat primitive, but understandable and usable. Know your time and channel for advance scheduling, it won't take those little numbers more modern VCR's use. Then be sure and turn it off.

Other- We've tried all the recommended program combo's on the "universal remote", but it won't talk to the tv. So keep both remotes handy on playback to adjust tv volume. The video input doesn't work with our equipment so I don't know how well this feature works. It does talk through the standard front inputs fine.

This is sort of a bait and switch machine. You go into the relationship with expectations it can't meet. It's just enough of a machine to wish you had spent more, somewhere else, on something else. Or bought something that does less and cost less. Every time we use it we feel vaguely ripped off.