Samsung DVD-HR 725

Author's product rating:   

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

Advantages:	Big HD, HDMI, DIVX
Disadvantages:	Can't copy DIVX to HD ,won't play mpegs off dvd or cd .

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

I spent a long time looking for a DVD recorder that had a built in hard drive and could also play back divx files. As it turned out there are few options. It boiled down to this and several LG models which i learnt could not fast forward and rewind divx which made them useless to me.
Even though this was the only unit that met my requirements im very pleased with it.

First i'll talk about connections. It has 2 Scart sockets both of which are RGB enabled. It has component,S-video,DVI and HDMI and DV input. Only critisiscm with connections is that the unit doesn't pass through RGB when the recorder is switched off or in standby. The unit needs to be on to pass it through.

Picture quality is excellent, im connected through an RGB Scart so aren't seeing the picture in all its glory but its cetainly very good.
Divx/Xvid playback is also excellent, the picture quality is very good, far better than my old Divx dvd player. I have lots of 20 min divx TV episodes which are around 140mb each. These look great when played back eevn though they are of such low quality.

Sound is excellent through my dolby pro logic setup. Mp3 sound is also quite good.

Ive noticed a few quirks as regards copying to the HDD. The most anoying one is that you can't copy DIVX off a dvd to the HD. This isn't a bug but simply a feature which they left out. It doesn't make sense when you can copy photos and mp3's to the HD.
Ive also noticed that sometimes when you copy mp3's to the hdd they skip on playback and i have to recopy them. I don't know if its because my DVD's need a clean.

Recording is very straightforward and the menus are well laid out for either Timer record or Videoplus. The Timer record only has room for 12 entires at a time which is a shame but not the end of the world.

Has some basic editing features which allow you to cut parts out of a recordeed program and split programes.

Overall im very happy with it despite the few quirks. It was very difficult to find something that met all my needs and this unit certianly does. Its also good to know that its HDMI ready for when i upgrade to Plasma :))

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