...) I bought the 4KUS DVR-230 from Asda for £99.97. I thought that I was getting a good deal and was spurred on when I read that some magazine had given it four stars and were recommending it.
My aims for the DVD recorder were to watch commercial DVDs and to archive programmes from my Fusion ... Read review
Advantages: Cheap, looks good physically, simple to operate, easy to make multi-region Disadvantages: Rotten support for widescreen TVs, can't add or hide chapters, no 3 hour mode, no firmware updates, no Nicam stereo
...faulty.) I bought the 4KUS DVR-230 from Asda for £99.97. I thought that I was getting a good deal and was spurred on when I read that some magazine had given it four stars and were recommending it.
My aims for the DVD recorder were to watch commercial DVDs and to archive programmes from my Fusion FVT100 (a freeview receiver/hard disk recorder) to DVD, also reviewed here.
The DVR-230 is a neat unit. It is quite thin at ... ...features.
The 4KUS brand is associated with the Lite-On organisation and the DVR-230 appears to be a clone of one of the Lite-On models. If you run the Nero InfoTool on a disk that has been recorded using the DVR-230, it reports that the application that created was "LVW5001VR". The LVW5001 is a Lite-On model number. Whereas, Lite-On have been supporting their branded machine with firmware updates (from their website) to ... more
This was my second flirtation with a DVD Recorder for my TV. My previous experience was with an Ellion DVR that is also included in my reviews (it was returned for a refund because the tuner was faulty.) I bought the 4KUS DVR-230 from Asda for £99.97. I thought that I was getting a good deal and was spurred on when I read that some magazine had given it four stars and were recommending it.
My aims for the DVD recorder were to watch commercial DVDs and to archive programmes from my Fusion FVT100 (a freeview receiver/hard disk recorder) to DVD, also reviewed here.
The DVR-230 is a neat unit. It is quite thin at a touch over 50mm. However, it is a full width device at 430mm and won't fit in many VCR type cabinets. It has an amber display with the basic function buttons on the front. Front connections also include phono audio/video in sockets and a firewire DV in (handy for transferring from a digital camcorder, but I have never used that feature). The DVD tray appears to be a bit flimsy though.
Connections on the rear include two scart sockets, audio out phonos, optical and coaxial outs. I connected the recorder to my TV and the FVRT100 to the second scart of the DVR-230. I connected the audio phonos to my amplifier. This meant that, when the unit was in standby, it passed through the signal from my FVT100 to the TV and the audio to my amplifier. When I powered on the DVR-230, it took control of the TV.
The remote control is okay but it does look and feel a bit cheap. The buttons aren't the best and the layout of the the skip forward/back and fast forward/rewind buttons are a bit weird (i.e. above and below their corresponding functions). They also don't have a positive feel to them.
The DVR has a simple and intuitive navigator function. It guides users through the different functions of the box and makes, for example, recording quite a straight forward task by presenting a sequence of easy to follow menus. However, this box does not have Videoplus so the settings of recordings need to entered in full.
One of my main gripes with the box was that it has an option to set it up for a widescreen (16:9) television, which I have. However, when you choose this option, it does not switch the TV screen wide (it stays in fullscreen mode) and you have to use the TV remote to change it manually. This mode only makes anamorphic DVDs show without black bars at the top and bottom. If the recorder cannot intelligently switch the screen mode according to the DVD settings, then I would have been at least happy with it running constantly in widescreen and having to switch manually to fullscreen if need be. I found it a nuisance that, every single time I turned the recorder on, I had to find the TV remote and change the aspect.
All recordings are made in fullscreen mode too, so if you attempt to use a widescreen recording on a fullscreen TV then it will appear squashed (from the sides) on the screen. This is common with DVD recorders but it is still a nuisance.
The only editing facilities that the recorder offers are to change title names or erase them. All completed recordings have chapter marks placed on them at 5 minute intervals. However, you cannot add more chapters at specific points in the recording or hide chapters. This is a pain because if you make a timed recording then you will need to fast forward to the start of the show each and every time it is viewed. Fair enough, this is acceptable if you are only viewing a recording one time but it would be nice to be able to cut out adverts.
The DVR-230 uses DVD+R and DVD+RW media. The "+" format is probably the better of the two current standards fighting it out for supremacy in the DVD standards market, DVD- (minus) being the other. Plus is faster and allows more advanced editing facilities. However, this is irrelevant as the DVR-230 doesn't support these features.
The 4KUS brand is associated with the Lite-On organisation and the DVR-230 appears to be a clone of one of the Lite-On models. If you run the Nero InfoTool on a disk that has been recorded using the DVR-230, it reports that the application that created was "LVW5001VR". The LVW5001 is a Lite-On model number. Whereas, Lite-On have been supporting their branded machine with firmware updates (from their website) to sort bugs and include the range of featues, there do not appear to be any updates available for the DVR-230.
For example, the DVR-230 has 4 recording modes (with decreasing video quality the more you fit on a disc). 1 hour, 2 hour, 4 hour and 6 hour. Lite-On have provided LVW5001 users with an additional 3 hour mode through a firmware update. Although it is apparently the same machine (or in the same family), 4KUS users should not expect any corresponding update for their models. The recorder is not mentioned on the 4KUS website and there does not appear to be any likelyhood of it appearing.
With regards to playing DVDs, the unit takes around the best part of half a minute to start up. However, the video quality is great. If the unit would start up quicker and switch the TV to widescreen then it would have been fine but I couldn't get past these niggles.
A helpful feature of the DVR-230 is that it is easily changed to multi-region mode, allowing it to play disks from anywhere in the world.
The unit also plays MP3 disks. However, when you insert a disk, the screen doesn't show the files on the disk. You also need to use the up and down buttons to select the track you wish to play. You cannot simply enter the track number using the numeric buttons on the remote. For example, if you wish to play track 50 then you will need to press the up button 49 times to get to it. This really removes a lot of the benefit from being able to play MP3 disks.
It also plays conventional CDs and you can jump straight to a track using the navigator. Which is much less relevant to CDs because they tend to only have around 12 tracks or so.
The unit does not recognise DIVX, only conventional DVDs.
My FVT100 outputs video in RGB, which the DVR-230 can record through its second scart socket. 1 and 2 hour recordings were great. 4 hour suffered from a notable lack of definition but were still pretty good. 6 hour mode is really just for stuff that you wanted to keep but aren't too bothered about the quality as it is notably blocky.
Anyway, as you may have realised, a lot of this is written in the past tense. This is because I bought the DVR-230 in May and returned it last week (in August) for a refund. The issue was that it just stopped recognising disks that it had made on a random basis. The unit is supplied with a list of recommended disks but this began with the disk that was supplied with the unit. Other disks then stopped working, although they worked fine with my other kit, and it became clear that there was some kind of problem. I took the unit back to Asda and obtained a refund as there were no similar units that I was familiar with.
After messing around with the Ellion and this supermarket DVD recorder model, I realised that life is too short for this and bought a Panasonic DMRES10 (review coming soon) which is a dream of a machine (so far!) I hate the phrase, "You get what you pay for" for the simple reason that you could quite easily pay a lot of money for garbage. However, the wow factor of paying ninety quid for a cheapo DVD recorder is far outweighed with the annoyances of trying to live with the thing.
