Ack! Pioneer 533H replacement???

[heavyharmonies]

I have a Pioneer 533H that I love to death. I'm now wanting to purchase an additional DVD recorder for my department at work. Lo and behold the 533H is no longer being sold, and the only current standalone DVD recorder from Pioneer with a hard drive (640) does not have a firewire input.

HDD is a must.
Firewire input is a must.

What other units should I be looking at?

[funkguy4]

a simple google search led me to....
Lite-On LVW-5045 DVD Recorder

meh

[redwudz]

You might look at the Toshiba models. At least the RD-XS34 seems to have a Firewire input and a 160GB hard drive. They seem to have generally good reports on the quality of their DVRs.

I have a Pioneer 633 with Firewire, but it appears Pioneer is not doing any more development of DVRs, they will probably just sell rebadged units from other manufacturers. I think it was a mistake eliminating the Firewire input, but if they are losing money on their units so much that they can't afford R&D anymore, it may be time to move on to a different manufacturer.

[FulciLives]

Go with the Pioneer DVR-640H-s

FIREWIRE is NOT a must!

The 533/633 had overly soft processing on the FIREWIRE port anyways making the analog port a better choice.

Any digital camcorder will have a way to output analog S-Video along with RCA Stereo audio jacks. This can provide just as good quality as using the FIREWIRE out ... at least when you are going direct to MPEG-2 DVD spec ala a stand alone DVD recorder.

The Pioneer DVR-640H-s is still made by Pioneer and the report that they were stopping DVD recorder development has since been shown to be false.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

P.S.
I have the Pioneer DVR-531H-s and I love it!