ILO vs LiteOn

[JohnnyCNote]

A couple of weeks ago I bought an ILO DVDR04 at WalMart for about $150. I had it up and running very quickly, installed the hacked firmware, and was able to start backing up my VHS collection to DVD with little trouble. I also found it was a good playback unit as my Apex AD1500 is not doing very well these days.

Then I was in the nearby Costco and saw that the LiteOn 5005 was available for about the same price. Having heard so many good things about it, and liking Costco for its great unlimited return policy, I took the ILO back to WalMart and got the 5005.

What a mistake that was! First, I couldn't get a signal from the SVHS jack. I knew that this was a simple matter of selecting it on the setup menu, but guess what - there was no SVHS option available! I checked here, the manual, LiteOn's website, and several other message forums and couldn't find anythng about this. So I resigned myself to using the regular composite jack and set about updating the firmware. NO GO! I've done this plenty of times before, and could not for the life of me get this to work.

After an hour, the answer was painfully obvious: take the LiteOn back to Costco, go to WalMart and get another ILO, which I did last night. On the shelf was an obviously resealed box that I'm nearly positive was the one I returned. However, not being 100% sure, I left it and got one that looked unopened. That means someone will unknowingly get a region and MV free model. After getting it home, in about 10 minutes I had not only hooked it up (using the SVHS jack), but also applied the hacked firmware and am now back where I was about two weeks ago.

I guess it's a case of nothing ventured, nothing gained, but for whatever reason I've had bad luck with LiteOn, even though the ILO is obviously manufactured by them. I had a 5001 a while back, but it started acting up after about a month so I took it back and got a Pioneer 201, which works great.

I'm still curious why the LiteOn 5005 was such a pain to set up. What gives?

[Bron]

Johnny, I'm not sure what a SVHS jack is...do you mean S-Video? Anyway, I bought a Liteon 5005 a few weeks back and I had no problems setting it up - very easy in fact and I have had no problems since.

My only complaint is the crappy builtin tuner. I use an external tuner in conjunction with the Liteon and that works great. Why they put such a crappy tuner in an otherwise fine unit I can't understand.

Anyway - for the $170 I paid, I think it was a good buy. It's pretty versatile, very easy to use, and the quality is good for the price paid. The ability to use nearly any media availabe is also nice and this is the only unit I know of that will record SVCD on CD-RW media - no big deal, but useful for transferring video bits to a PC with only a CD (i.e. no DVD drive) or sharing small videos with PC users.

Anyway, so far I've been satisfied with it. Not a perfect machine, but a pretty good machine with lots of features for the price i.e. it records audio CD, has a friendly 'Guide' feature for quick and easy recording, decent quality output, and so on.

Again, not sure what your problem was. I attached to my HDTV via composite first, set everything up, later switched to S-Video without any problems. Another good choice is the Panasonic E55 if you care to spend a little more, but the Liteon 5005's ability to use DVD+RW won me over.

Goodluck however you go!

Bron