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| Posted by | Seán Byrne |
| Posted on | 23/06/05 21:05 |
| Number of views | 22940 |
Positive:
- Supports DVD+/-R and DVD+/-RW.
- Supports CD-R/RW recording in Video CD, Super Video CD and Audio format.
- Records Audio to CD-R/RW without requiring specific Audio CD-R/RW.
- Excellent DVD+/-R recording quality and decent DVD-RW recording quality.
- Records to all our DVD+RW and DVD-RW media at their certified speed.
- Excellent picture quality in both HQ and SP DVD/HDD recording modes.
- Very good Video CD picture quality when compared with many PC software based Video CD encoders.
- Good retail bundle including various SCART & AV leads and RF cable.
- Wide selection of AV inputs and outputs.
- Includes Component out and camcorder DV in.
- User-friendly guider, very useful for those who are new to DVD recording.
- Very straight-forward HDDé DVD and DVDé HDD copying (with suitable media).
- Supports MP3, WMA and WAV playback in a wide range of encoding formats and bit rates on both CD and DVD.
- Supports MPEG 1 & 2 files on a data CD or DVD, even with unusual resolutions.
- Easy to unlock the drive's region restriction with the use of a secret remote sequence (not an official feature).
Negative:
- Only 4x recording speed to all our 8x certified DVD-R and DVD+R media.
- Very poor DVD+RW recording quality, resulting in compatibility issues.
- Very disappointing CD-R and CD-RW read & write performance - Appears to read & writes both disc types at 2x.
- 2 to 3 C2 error bursts present on all CD-R/RW (Super) Video CD recordings.
- Disappointing picture quality for Super Video CD and DVD Long Play.
- No manual tuning support on TV. A new channel will require a full rescan to tune in the new channel, thus losing all existing presets and channel names.
- Very sluggish to play tracks from large folders of over 200 tracks.
- Sluggish built-in editor, making it quite tedious to quickly title several tracks.
- No MP3 encoding support and no MP3 decoding to Audio CD support.
- Player groups all hierarchical folders on a disc down to one level, but does not put them in alphabetical order.
- Easy Guider does not give any tips on screens were selections are abbreviated.
Conclusion:
As this is our first standalone DVD Recorder review, we are unable to compare it to previous reviews. However, it has pretty much all the features one would typically look for on a standalone DVD Recorder including support for all popular CD and DVD recordable media and even a large 160GB internal HDD for time-shifting and recording without worrying about having blank media at hand. On the other hand, as a DVD player, it includes playback support for Video CDs, Super Video CDs, Audio CDs and even discs containing pictures and MP3 & WMA files.
The main positive points: Unlike most VCRs, this Recorder appears to have been designed with the casual user in mind by offering various guides and reducing the number of operations one must go through just to get something done. It features excellent DVD+/-R recording quality, excellent picture quality on both HQ and SP DVD recording modes and support for a wide range of recordable DVD & CD media types from our testing. When it comes to connections, this Recorder features all common AV inputs, features outputs for the majority of TVs including component out and also features both optical and coaxial audio outputs for digital surround sound systems. Finally, when it comes to automatically tuning in TV channels, it picks up even very weak stations that most VCRs and TVs miss during the auto-scan.
The main negative points: The main major negative point is the very slow reading and writing performance when it comes to CD-R's and CD-RW's. Although most consumers are likely going to record directly from TV to CD anyway, it would be a very tedious task to build up a CD collection on the player as full each disc takes around 45 minutes to copy over and only full CDs (apart from data CDs) can be copied over. Also, we are rather disappointed when it comes to Super Video CD quality as despite the resolution being over double that of Video CD, we do not see much improvement in the picture quality. Long Play mode on DVD also turns out rather poor also. Finally, we got very poor recording quality results for DVD+RW's and C2 error bursts when recording CD-R's and CD-RW's in Video/Super Video CD mode.
To sum it all up, this Recorder looks like it could easily replace an existing PVR, DVD player and possibly the VCR under the set and we would recommend it all users who are looking for a decent standalone DVD Recorder, including those who have never recorded a disc on a PC before. It would also be the ideal replacement for any VCR user, especially those who make daily recordings and wish to do away with those days of tapes wearing out, time spent rewinding and fast-forwarding tapes and so on.
By using our price grabber feature cdfreaks.pricegrabber.com the drive is listed at $303.88 (June, 14 2005).
You may discuss/comment this review below or in this forum thread. This forum thread may also be used to ask questions around this drive or request additional tests.
Thanks to:
E-Net Distribution - United Kingdom for providing the RiDisc DVD-R, Datawrite Blue DVD-R and Datawrite Titanium DVD-R media used in this review.
MMORE International B.V. - The Netherlands for providing the DVD-R media used in this review.
Sky Media Manufacturing sa - Switzerland for providing the CD-R 52x media used in this review.
Same for the OEM-Version, Philips 520H
To me, the audio sounds fine directly from the Lite-On itself and I didn't notice any unusual background hiss, unlike what most PC onboard soundcards pick up. I tried recording from various sources including CDs, over SCART, TV, etc. However, as the audio output (over Phono and SCART) is fairly high, it can cause distortion on audio equipment that has very sensitive inputs. For example on my PC's sound card, I had to set the Line-in level fairly close to the bottom to avoid the input meter from peaking.
I did also check for other issues that people mentioned in user reviews back in January such as audio-video sync problems after an hour of recording, remote keys acting if pressed twice, etc. However I haven't encountered any issue with the remote and after a 2.5 hour recording, the audio & video was still in perfect sync that I could see, i.e. 'B' & 'P' sounds matched the person's lips.
And it´s the best magazine for video-equipment and can not be compared with magazine´s like Audio-Video-Bild usw.
And I read in many forum´s that almost nobody can say that Liteon DVD-Recorders have a good picture-quality
I have seen Microsoft often use image and audio analysis to show that their codecs beats other audio and visual codecs and for a good while I often seen people boasting about how good Windows Media sounds & looks until later when visual & listening tests have changed this around.
Contacted Liteon & ended up taking 5 days off work, each time I was waiting in for the unit to be collected. Eventually, Liteon agreed to send an upgraded unit - 5045B and uplift the old one at the same time.
4 months later, this new machine suffered the same fate. I had originally put a couple of films onto DVD so I knew this feature worked.
Contacted Liteon, this time I lost 2 day's pay waiting for collection & then delivery of the repaired item.
2 months later, I have the self same problem - the machine simply doesn't recognise any DVD-r/rw, +r/rw, or even blank CDs.
When it works, this machine is the business, when it breaks down, it's a real PITA getting it fixed.
Rather than waste any more money taking time off work, I'm going to spend a day's wages & buy a standalone DVD recorder & link to this machine. It will pay for itself straight away because I won't need to take a second day off work.
And BTW, I tried to upgrade the firmware but the machine won't recognise any disk that is or was blank, so I have a CD full of firmware upgrades now destined for the bin.
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