DVD Recorder?

ohandels

Where's the best place in dublin to buy a dvd recorder, or can you recommend any dvd recorders?

Furp

I was in curry's in liffey valley last week and they had a few of them about 5-6 ranging in price from €400 and up.

Also if you are near an xtra vision store which has a home entertainment section they might have some, as latley i have been noticing that there prices are quite good and you usually get €50 vouchers thrown in plus a 3 year maintenance and labour warranty as standard.

Travis Bickle

ONLINE,

300 euro.

ohandels

Any specific models?

iMax

Panasonic have just dropped their prices in the US, I can get the one with the 80GB HDD now for about $450, so they could be dropping them worldwide soon.

Travis Bickle

Panasonic recorders.highly reccommended.

Recorders from the US should be cheaper,plus there's the dollar vs euro thing.
but who actually delivers?

iMax

Amazon would deliver but you have the problem of import duty plus the whole USA tuners not having a UHF band (essential for Irish TV stations) thing...

But if you were hooking it up to a digital source souch as sky, then no problem.

bucks73

Dvd recorders or players from the US wont have scart sockets either.

Try Amazon.co.uk for recorders in sterling.

10000maniacs

Brown Thomas are selling a philips DVDR70 +RW for €349.

cramp

I have had 4 dvd recorders in the last 2 years...........dont buy a PHILIPS!!!
stick with SONY/PANNY/JVC.....i have the SONY GX3 for nearly a year with NO coasters, if u like coasters buy PHILIPS!

John R

A DVD recorder from the US will NOT be able to record Irish TV programmes.

I have a Philips (DVD-R75) and have not had any problems with it.

Try http://www.amazon.co.uk
or http://www.richersounds.com
or http://www.svp.co.uk
for good deals, the latter also has cheap quality discs.

Travis Bickle

Why can't a dvd recorder record irish shows?.

A dvd player an be used here,with a step UP transformer.

John R

Originally posted by Travis Bickle
Why can't a dvd recorder record irish shows?.

A dvd player an be used here,with a step down transformer.

The power supply is the least of the problems.

The primary problem with a US recorder is that it's tuner will be set to recieve NTSC 525 line 60Hz transmissions and the recorder will also be set to those standards. Irish TV is 625 line 50Hz PAL. Some recorders may be capable of switching to record Irish TV but the inbuilt tuners will not.

Very few US players can play "PAL" standard discs.

zilog_jones

There's different types of PAL too whe talking about analogue TV transmissions (due to slightly different sound sub-carriers and whatnot). In Ireland we use the PAL I system, which the UK, South Africa and a few other countries use. Many things like these are all multi-PAL-system these days (even many TV sets), but there's a chance even if you get a DVD recorder from mainland Europe that it won't work here... well it will work, it's just you won't get any sound from TV broadcasts, which you *might* want.

Even in the UK, stuff like this can be slightly different, because they no longer use any of the VHF TV bands - they only use UHF - but in Ireland we use all of them. So there is a chance (if the tuners aren't multi-system) that if you even get one from the UK, you won't get all the channels here.

All that above is assuming you use analogue TV though - if you have digital cable/MMDS or Sky, the tuner won't matter at all and any sort of PAL-compatible recorder will work fine. But whatever you do, *DON'T* get one from North America or Japan!

Travis Bickle

Thinking of getting a receiver/dvd player combi from Germany.
Thinking,the plugs might be different etc...

ANY PAL issues there?.Where do i check?....

zilog_jones

What make is it? In Germany they use PAL D and K - the audio isn't compatible with the PAL I we use here. Most brands these days make all their TVs with multi-region PAL (i.e. you can select the country or the PAL type in the user menu). Really cheap stuff is less likely to do this, though. From my experience most Philips, Sony, Thomson and Samsung sets usually are multi-region, but the cheaper Panasonic ones (the Z7 chassis ones anyway - it'll say that on the back) don't. If you're actually going to a shop Germany, you can probably check by looking at the on-screen menu, the manual, and those company catalogues usually say too. It may be harder to find out if you're getting it online, unless that brand has a decent online catalogue.

zilog_jones

The multi-regionness of DVD recorders doesn't look very hopeful. After looking at Panasonic's UK site (there's no Irish one), it seems all the recorders I looked at were PAL I only, and looking at similar models on the German site it appears they do PAL B/G/H and SECAM only. The model numbers were different at the ends too, so they're *definately* incompatible. Though saying all this, the Sony DVD recorders sold here, in the UK and Germany all have the same model numbers, according to the website...

I highly doubt that ones sold in the US will do any sort of PAL at all then, and I still say it's probably best to stick to buying one in rip-off Ireland.

daveg

Check out this thread. I've posted a link to a site in the UK with who I purchased a Pioneer 3100 DVDR/RW recorder. Brilliant piece of kit. It features timeslip recording. Also the DVD recorders from the site in my link are all multiregion.

zilog_jones

After readin that thread, I think there's still a chance your recorder isn't fully compatible with analogue TV here. As I said before, the UK use the same system as us - PAL I - but there are several different frequency bands used for TV - there's the UHF band, and a few VHF bands. In the UK, they use *only* the UHF band, but here the VHF bands are also still used in some parts of the country, and VHF is also always used for analogue cable TV.

Many devices which require analogue TV tuners (TV sets, VCRs, etc.) sold in the UK only have UHF tuners because of this - I've had this problem when moving to Ireland from the UK five years ago. We brought 2 TVs and a VCR over with us from the UK, and they were all UHF-only - thus we were not able to watch cable on them and we had no proper roof aerial. We ended up selling one of the TVs because it was crappy and old anyway, we threw out the VCR because it was also pretty old and totally useless as a recorder here (plus it ate tapes!), and ended up using an Irish-bought VCR with the other TV, and just watched cable from the VCR's tuner.

There's a chance that your DVD recorder only has UHF, and could just be living in an area where you get the terrestrial channels on UHF, and due to your use of Sky Digital for other channels you have never encountered a problem. "Multi-region" may have just been referring to the pre-recorded DVDs they can play - it may not be refering to the recorder's analogue TV tuner at all.

daveg

Originally posted by zilog_jones
After readin that thread, I think there's still a chance your recorder isn't fully compatible with analogue TV here. As I said before, the UK use the same system as us - PAL I - but there are several different frequency bands used for TV - there's the UHF band, and a few VHF bands. In the UK, they use *only* the UHF band, but here the VHF bands are also still used in some parts of the country, and VHF is also always used for analogue cable TV.

Many devices which require analogue TV tuners (TV sets, VCRs, etc.) sold in the UK only have UHF tuners because of this - I've had this problem when moving to Ireland from the UK five years ago. We brought 2 TVs and a VCR over with us from the UK, and they were all UHF-only - thus we were not able to watch cable on them and we had no proper roof aerial. We ended up selling one of the TVs because it was crappy and old anyway, we threw out the VCR because it was also pretty old and totally useless as a recorder here (plus it ate tapes!), and ended up using an Irish-bought VCR with the other TV, and just watched cable from the VCR's tuner.

There's a chance that your DVD recorder only has UHF, and could just be living in an area where you get the terrestrial channels on UHF, and due to your use of Sky Digital for other channels you have never encountered a problem. "Multi-region" may have just been referring to the pre-recorded DVDs they can play - it may not be refering to the recorder's analogue TV tuner at all.

I bought my DVD recorder from the UK. It tuned in all RTE/TV3 and TNG stations from my terrestrial ariel.

highdef

I was having a quick look at the stuff in Liffey valley Dixon's yesterday afternoon. I saw a Logik DVD recorder for only €279.99, allegedly down from €399.99. Didn't bother looking at the connections at the back but seeing as is a fairly unknown brand (unknown now but gaining popularity very quickly), I would imagine it has component and all the nice connections that cheap DVD players tend to have. One connection I was surprised to find was a firewire socket along with phono A/V inputs at the front. I know with the Philips recorders, you pay a BIG premium for this socket. If you have a mini DV or Digi 8 camcorder and want to copy video straight to DVD with no loss in quality, this socket would come in very handy.
Oh, and I have a Philips DVD-R70 DVD recorder a good while now (I got it when the recorders 1st came out so I was a sucker and paid a fortune for it) and I have had absolutely no problems with it. My Dad has since got the same model too. He has only had 1 problem. He recorded something off the ntl digital and then got a disc error when it was done but thats all. And he uses the recorder a lot. The VHS is gone up to attic heaven

mike65

Just a warning for anyone who is inspired to look for a cheap recorder and heads to RicherSounds - they have a Yamada for £119 here are a few reviews - http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/88673
and http://www.reviewcentre.com/review127287.html, http://www.reviewcentre.com/review125324.html

My VCR is dying again so if anyone has a good budget reccomendation...

Mike.

AntiRip

You can get a Panasonic DVD Recorder in Amazon for e369
Click Here For Link

and judging from the reviews it's a fantastic piece of kit.
Although, I can't see the difference between DVD-Ram discs & DVD-RW discs.

John R

DVD-Ram disks are random access media, like a hard disk, they are incompatible with dvd players but can be used in some recorders for timeslip recordings.

frost

off topic, but what about the PC DVD writers from the USA? If you bring in a laptop with a DVD writer from the USA, will you have problems with it playing Irish DVDs, what kind of video input it can take, or maybe it might burn DVDs that you couldn't play here?

zilog_jones

John R wrote:

DVD-Ram disks are random access media, like a hard disk, they are incompatible with dvd players but can be used in some recorders for timeslip recordings.

They're not incompatible with *all* DVD Players - most (if not all) recent Panasonic DVD players can play them, including a few others, and certain DVD-ROM drives can play them too, though probably won't be able to record unless it's a Panasonic too.

John R

zilog_jones wrote:

They're not incompatible with *all* DVD Players - most (if not all) recent Panasonic DVD players can play them, including a few others, and certain DVD-ROM drives can play them too, though probably won't be able to record unless it's a Panasonic too.

I am terribly sorry :rolleyes: , they are incompatible with 99% of DVD players.

It is a completely different format to DVD video and no other manufacturers are likely to make compatible players either. DVD+ and DVD- on the other hand will play on about 90% of players and most if not all new models

ohandels

John R wrote:

DVD-Ram disks are random access media, like a hard disk, they are incompatible with dvd players but can be used in some recorders for timeslip recordings.

Whats time slip recordings?

John R

ohandels wrote:

Whats time slip recordings?

It is where you can watch part of the recording while it is still recording, the same as HDD recorders such as SKY+.