Alba RDVD 1002

...when I came across the ALBA RDVD1002 for sale in Argos, just before Christmas 2005, for under £70.00. I thought that I couldn't go wrong at that price. Because the unit was an Alba I thought that it would have a basic feature set, but would be reasonably reliable.

I was wrong! The recorder is actually very good with lots of features.

It only records on one type of DVD (+R/+RW), which I have never found to be a problem ...
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The unit has 2 scart sockets which is always a bonus, It has audio and video connectors behind a cover at the front of the unit, and you can backup your camcorder movies, etc with ease. The unit has an S-Video input and audio outputs .

The box only receives analogue signals and the automatic tuning easily found all the 5 terrestrial channels.

I have attached my freeview box to the unit and recording digital ... more

I had been toying with the idea of buying a DVD recorder when I came across the ALBA RDVD1002 for sale in Argos, just before Christmas 2005, for under £70.00. I thought that I couldn't go wrong at that price. Because the unit was an Alba I thought that it would have a basic feature set, but would be reasonably reliable.

I was wrong! The recorder is actually very good with lots of features.

It only records on one type of DVD (+R/+RW), which I have never found to be a problem because this type of disc is widely available.

The unit has 2 scart sockets which is always a bonus, It has audio and video connectors behind a cover at the front of the unit, and you can backup your camcorder movies, etc with ease. The unit has an S-Video input and audio outputs .

The box only receives analogue signals and the automatic tuning easily found all the 5 terrestrial channels.

I have attached my freeview box to the unit and recording digital TV is quite straight forward. All I have to do is set the freeview box to switch the correct channel on and off at the appropriate time. I then set the timer on the DVD Recorder to record from the SCART input at the appropriate time also, and everything works fine. However, one thing that I quickly learned was that you need to set the Freeview box, or whatever is attached to the SCART socket to switch on before the DVD Recorder is set to record, otherwise the DVD recorder will start up check the SCART socket for input, work out that there is not a live signal attached to it, show an error on the front display panel, then switch itself off. This is very clever, but it did take me a few days to figure out why it was not recording the programmes I had set it to. Apart from that the unit performs faultlessly, it plays pre-recorded DVD's, with all the functions that you would expect, and the picture and sound quality is very good.

The recorder has 5 different recording quality settings which range from about 1 hour for high quality to 6 hours for long play. In my opinion the 6 hour setting is equivalent to Video cassette quality, and the 4 hour setting is my preferred setting, as it is on a par with the original broadcast.

When recording the recorder creates a picture on the menu screen for each programme, and on rewritable DVD's these pictures can be changed for an image from that particular recording, and the title name can be set to one of you choice.

All in all a very useful DVD recorder. If you want a basic DVD recorder that simply does what it says on the box, can record from a wide range of AV equipment, and is very reasonably priced then I would recommend buying this one.

However, if I was to buy a new one tomorrow I would probably pay a little more and purchase one with a Freeview receiver built in. 

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