A Holiday Call for Help!

[hexfield]

Hey folks. I'm in desperate need of your assistance. My dad wants to transfer all of our old family VHS tapes to DVD. I'm looking for a set top dvd recorder for under $200 (preferably under $100) that will do the best quality job for the money. Got to get this figured out by Christmas so any help would be welcome! Thanks a lot.

--R

[lordsmurf]

Maybe the SV2000 at Walmart. Maybe.

For $300, the Philips 3575 at Circuit City (and some Walmarts) would be better.

You want a machine that can clean up VHS quality, not transfer it with all the ugly errors intact.

[hexfield]

Thanks for the reply. How much of a maybe is that SV2000? The thing is, after this one time project I don't know how often he'll use this so I'm wary of dropping $300.

[orsetto]

The input quality on the Phillips will likely be much better, there are members on this forum who have thoroughly tested this model and report it to make decent VHS transfers. Bear in mind in any case to get the absolute best transfers would require investing another $300+ in a high-end VHS deck for playback, so if you are trying to get off as inexpensively as possible you should at least choose a DVD recorder with good dubbing quality like the Phillips. This will give your Dad a halfway passable chance at watchable transfers.

The Phillips has a good hard drive which permits editing the tapes before burning the DVDs and it has rapidly become known as the only good current hard drive model with ATSC tuner available legally at retailers in the USA. As such it has decent resale value on eBay or Craigs List, if you buy it for $300 you could probably get $200 back in a couple months reselling it after your Dad is finished. The SV2000 has received mixed reviews and apparently does not have strong resale value, if that is even a factor for you. Honestly for this kind of family project it is not a good idea to try and surprise your Dad with some random recorder as a gift, you need to test drive it and return it to the dealer if need be. If you want to start cheap, buy him the SV2000 from a store that also carries the Phillips and has return privileges. The SV2000 might work perfectly for you (it does happen), in which case you got a great bargain, but if it proves disappointing you will definitely want to exchange it for the Phillips, so leave that door open for yourself.

If you are new to this whole VHS-to-DVD business, it can be daunting. There is a LOT of information to absorb that may or may not apply to you, and doing it correctly is not always as easy (or $ cheap) as people expect. If you just want to copy random old sports and TV show tapes that you may watch one more time in the next ten years, pretty much anything will work for you, who cares about ultimate quality. But if its family movies that are irreplaceable and important to you, you'll need to spend a little more $ and a little more time and effort. A lot of us have learned this the hard way. Good luck!

[lordsmurf]

The Philips will likely have a decent resale value, given the scarcity of them, and the growing popularity of the model.

[MJA]

Hey folks. I'm in desperate need of your assistance. My dad wants to transfer all of our old family VHS tapes to DVD. I'm looking for a set top dvd recorder for under $200 (preferably under $100) that will do the best quality job for the money. Got to get this figured out by Christmas so any help would be welcome! Thanks a lot.

--R

http://www.radioshack.com/family/index.jsp?categoryId=2032172&cp=2032057

you get what you pay for

[hexfield]

That Toshiba is more in my price range. Any thoughts on that model? Or is it a case of "get the good one for $300 or you might as well get the SV2000"?

[samijubal]

Toshiba does great VHS to DVD, at least the ones I use from '04 and '05 do.

[powerpc123]

I got the SV2000 and would buy another in a minute. It did a fantastic job of transferring all circa 1950 8mm - circa 1980 VHS family footage.

[orsetto]

Toshibas are superb but can be highly variable- get a good one, its great, get a bad one, you'll curse it. If you are going to take chances to stay within a budget, you may as well save the extra $50 and buy the SV2000 at Wal*Mart, where you can at least return it no questions asked if you don't like it and upgrade to something else. Toshibas can be hell to return depending on the dealer, make sure the store you choose has a liberal return/exchange policy (Amazon does, Radio Shack might). If you do get a Toshiba that works well, keep it in good condition by using only write-once DVD-R or DVD+R media. The biggest complaint I hear about Toshiba is their disc drives die quickly if you keep erasing and reusing RW discs.

All the brands have ups and downs from model to model, season to season, none are guaranteed perfect. Phillips made total garbage DVD recorders for years and then out of the blue produced the very respectable 3575 this year, some people think the very cheap SV2000 is amazing value for the dollar, and there are Toshiba fanatics who spend a pretty penny repairing older units because they are unequaled for video quality and features no longer available. Panasonic polarizes the forums: people either love them or loathe them with no one in the middle. (I favor Pioneer myself but they pulled out of the US market last year.) So you see it can be tough to decide, especially on a limited budget. Best advice is to pick the store for its return policy before you pick the recorder, so you'll be covered no matter what.

[jjeff]

Orestto, Some interesting points. I kind of caught onto your point about RW discs being hard on drives. Is that a proven point? That could explain why I have killed 2 Panasonic DVDR's, in the past 3 years. I used them almost exclusively for timeshifiting w/RW discs. And now they are basically only good for players. They crash frequently when trying to record, more so on RW discs.
I currently have a DVDR w/hdd, so I think my days of RW discs are coming to a end though.
Again have you read that RW discs are harder on drives than R discs? Thanks

[orsetto]

I currently have a DVDR w/hdd, so I think my days of RW discs are coming to a end though.
Again have you read that RW discs are harder on drives than R discs?

The trend of DVD recorder drive failure reports on various forums over the last few years does suggest moderate-to-heavy use of eraseable/rewritable media, especially re-use of the same handful of RW discs daily, is a primary factor in recorder burnout. Last year I scored a deal on several units with dead optical drives, not the easiest thing in the world to fix on your own. After gleaning historical and repair info from the forums, I was able to repair some of them for resale, and as luck would have it a new network tech at my office revealed he was a recent ex-A/V-service-person. I picked his brain about these drive issues and he confirmed overuse of RW media will definitely wear out the lasers in these machines prematurely, dramatically so with Toshiba decks followed closely by Panasonic and then Pioneer and other makes a more distant third but still vulnerable. The "erase" function is what really seems to do them in.

Toshiba drives are incredibly fragile and prone to failure, when repairing them at home virtually no Toshiba deck owner wastes their time replacing a dead Toshiba drive with another Toshiba drive, they nearly always select a compatible drive from another mfr and make a shotgun marriage. If you have an older very expensive Toshiba with HDD, it really is the only way to ensure continued reliability. Older Panasonic decks are optimized for DVD-RAM, period: they only barely tolerate a few brands of write-once DVD-R as a grudging afterthought and too much non-RAM recording will drag down an older Panny. Newer Pannys are more flexible with media, but its the older feature-rich models that are in high demand, and those are getting harder to feed being such picky eaters. Pioneers are somewhat sturdier and less picky but they too suffer, especially if you overuse their "high speed copy" function to make a large qty of RWs all in one day. Oddly enough, the much-maligned early JVCs that had the "loading" power supply problem actually have incredibly tough optical drives- damn near unkillable. The newest JVC drives fail before you even get the tray open, the other extreme entirely.

If you want to endlessly erase and record programs but not archive them, forget RW media and pony up for a HDD-equipped DVD recorder while there are still a few available, its just a much better and more reliable system. Second choice would be a DVD-RAM capable deck, Panny in the USA or newest Pioneers if you live in Canada where you can buy them legally and cheaply. Otherwise, stick to write-once DVD-R or DVD+R, your deck will last longer. (This drive wear issue seems much less of a problem with the burners installed in computers, perhaps because they have more flexible operating modes than the crude OS in a dvd recorder, or maybe because its so easy to replace a $30 burner in a computer with a new updated one every year?) The biggest drawback to recordable DVD, even now, is that its a voodoo technology which never got locked down properly. The drive makers and media makers are in a close race every day to see which of them can screw with the standards the most. Just bizarre. Let's hope we all live to see the day of the $20 terabyte solid-state thumb drive so we can ditch the discs altogether .

[hexfield]

Thanks for the all the info guys. With all of this to consider, I'm just not confident enough to risk a christmas present on this decision (and on the reliability of the model I go with). Instead I think I'll make this a post-christmas shopping trip so my dad and I can both discuss it. At any rate, thanks again!

[lordsmurf]

Toshibas are superb but can be highly variable- get a good one, its great, get a bad one, you'll curse it.

That Toshiba is more in my price range. Any thoughts on that model? Or is it a case of "get the good one for $300 or you might as well get the SV2000"?

Toshiba does great VHS to DVD, at least the ones I use from '04 and '05 do.

Toshiba is only good if you get the XS series machines (and an older KX or two). The others don't filter video. So no, it's not of any use to transfer VHS.

[lordsmurf]

Orestto, Some interesting points. I kind of caught onto your point about RW discs being hard on drives. Is that a proven point?

Any disc can be hard on a drive, if the disc is crappy. CD-R, DVD-ROM, DVD-R, DVD-RAM, DVD-RW, etc. Those $1 retail DVD-ROM movie discs from Walmart are likely to be more damaging than a good DVD-RW.

I have a stash of discs that I've been using for years now. PVC DVD-RW, TDK DVD-RW and MKM DVD-RW. These are good discs, and there is no extra wear on the machines, no. These discs all pass every test of quality, even after 100 or more uses, 3-4 years later.

[samijubal]

Toshibas are superb but can be highly variable- get a good one, its great, get a bad one, you'll curse it.

That Toshiba is more in my price range. Any thoughts on that model? Or is it a case of "get the good one for $300 or you might as well get the SV2000"?

Toshiba does great VHS to DVD, at least the ones I use from '04 and '05 do.

Toshiba is only good if you get the XS series machines (and an older KX or two). The others don't filter video. So no, it's not of any use to transfer VHS.

That's crap. The KX50 and the D-R4 look exactly the same with VHS to DVD.

[lordsmurf]

Are you saying the DR4 has noise filters that are identical to the XS series?