Philips DVDR70

Author's product rating:   

Picture Playback	Excellent
Sound Level	Excellent
Ease of Use	Average
Range of Features	Above Average
Value for Money	Excellent

Advantages:	Very realiable, solid machine
Disadvantages:	One or Two niggles from slowness to not liking cheaper discs

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

We've had this machine for nearly 3 years now. Its not perfect, and it does have its own little niggles, but once you get used to them, overall its an excellent machine, and so far reliable so if you are looking for something and you come across one of these machines I would say its worth a look.

First the best aspects of the recorder.

Plenty of choice on recording times. From very high quality of an hour, through to up to 6 hours on a disc.
Excellent quality of picture and sound, which although does drop off at 6 hours, up to 4 hours, the drop off isn't too noticeable, and between 1 and 2.5 hours recording is negligible.
Reliable! We've had our machine for just under 3 years and its going as well today as it did when we first had it. We've had a number of different models as well in that time, and not one of them has lasted in the same way! Including Sony and Panasonic models. Neither lasted 12 months and yet cost at least as much as this machine did.
Very easy to set up the timer to record, and it works well with both Sky and Freeview TV set up.
The booklet that came with it was comprehensive and easy enough to read and use. We arent great technically at this sort of thing, but we managed to have it set up and running within an hour using just the booklet.

Okay onto the niggles.

First of all, it can be slow waiting for it to all set itself up to work! You need a bit of patience when you power up and go to use it. Its fairly slow on command from the remote.
You can only use +R or +RW discs.
It tends to completely reject a lot of cheaper discs and gives a lot of disc errors as a result. We now have started using only Phillips Discs (we can get them cheap enough off Ebay) and its made all the difference. Cheaper or other types of disc were basically false economy.
You must remember to finalise a +R disc before using it in another machine, and if you are using a disc for more than one recording you must ensure the time set for recording is kept right the way through. For example, you set the disc to a 2 hour recording time - you cannot then use the same disc for a 4 hour recording time unless you only intend to play it back on the Phillips machine.

Overall, the operating niggles are just that, and we've got so used to them we dont notice them now and they certainly wouldn't be enough for us to not look at this model or its predecessor as a replacement.