Philips DVDR880 DVD Recorder

RRP: £499.00

Amazon: £329.00 (April 2003)

On the subject of price, back in 1996 it seemed good value to buy a Philips VR747 VCR for around £430 and blank 4-hour tapes could be purchased in bulk packs for the equivalent of £2 each, so that's how I justified things to myself when this DVD review unit had to go back to the PR company and I bought a multi-region model myself for £365 from Richer Sounds in late February, although as I write a month later the price for the standard model has dropped to just under £330.

The cost of the discs is a snip too. A website with which I have no affiliation but which sells blank DVD+R discs, the cheapest being little more than a quid, is homepage.ntlworld.com/emperordalek and as I type LordoftheDeals.co.uk knock out DVD+RW rewritable discs in a standard DVD case - as opposed to a stack of discs in a 'cake tin' - for a penny under two quid each.

So, once you've hooked the machine up is it as easy to use as a standard VCR? I think so. Like a VCR you can tune in and record from all the basic analogue channels. They can also be sorted into an alternate order if so desired (I have Sky and Freeview floating through my system via RF just in case I need to, albeit in mono, and these weren't picked up in the order I wanted), but you cannot rename them unfortunately.

You can also record from any other source you can shove down a SCART connection, even another DVD if it's a home-made one. Retail DVDs tend to contain macrovision which aims to prevent copying, but there are so many devices out on the market which can strip this right out and while such a thing isn't legal I cannot pretend that the ability isn't there.

Where I find this unit most useful is to use it in combination with my TiVo. Gameshows like Never Mind the Buzzcocks will never get full releases on DVD, and for those that do you can't guarantee they'll make it onto the home format complete with all music as broadcast since separate rights have to be obtained, as proved with the recent Cold Feet Series 5.

As I did regularly with my VCR, I'd start any recording with the machine paused and ready to record once I unpaused it. The manual doesn't appear to mention that on a disc's first recording it'll need to initialise the menu and 'post format' the disc, so I'll press 'record', then 'pause' half-a-second later, and once that's ready, 'stop' so it'll get the disc ready for the first proper recording.

It's worth mentioning that for any new recording you make, that you ensure the cursor is pointing to the next 'Empty title' at the bottom of the menu, so as not to record over anything currently on the disc. You may be able to re-record whatever you like on a rewritable disc, but for a write-once anything deleted or recorded over won't give you back the valuable disc space.

Also, on a write-once disc you can't divide a title. That function, when used on a DVD+RW allows the splitting in two of anything recording onto the disc, so if you, for example, transfer several episodes of a programme onto the disc, you can then split them up, chop out trailers between the programme and be left with the episodes exact and of better quality than VHS would give them.

I found that the recording quality is first-rate up until the SP+ mode, but after that you do start to notice the difference and by EP it's getting close to VHS quality. SP+ can be used if you're recording a 6-part series from a commercial channel and are intending to strip out the adverts. The various qualities and lengths are as below:

HQ  - 1 hour
SP  - 2 hours
SP+ - 2.5 hours
LP  - 3 hours
EP  - 4 hours

Those with a Philips DVDR890 also have the option of "EP+" which runs for 6 hours. I understand that it may be possible to flash the ROM in the DVDR880 to update the firmware so it allows EP+, but while I've had this denied, I've also heard unofficially that it's possible. I would only do this if an official disc became available though as I wouldn't want to bugger up the machine.

Once a recording is complete you can rename it, as well as the disc's title, although this can be a bit cumbersome doing this with the cursor buttons. Extra chapters can be inserted - and automatic ones deleted - and an image can be selected from the programme to use with the menu, but I've had problems with both of these latter options.

Firstly, in the DVD title menu, "Make Edits Available" is meant to appear so extra chapter stops will appear when the disc has been finalised and used in a standard DVD player. However, sometimes this doesn't appear on DVD+R discs. The manual states this means they're already compatible, yet the extra chapters I've inserted don't show up on the DVD players I've tried (Creative Dxr2 PC DVD-ROM, Alba DVD114, plus Playstation 2 and an Xbox). I know the edits won't be compatible with all DVD players but I thought I'd have had a chance with at least one in four different machines. It's worth noting that a blank disc will start with the edits boxed checked to show they're compatible, but after a recording or two it just disappears(!) I've tried rebooting it but to no avail.

The 'image menu' feature caused far more problems than that, though, after I'd filled half a disc. It froze while updating the image and absolutely nothing on the remote or the player would stop this. I gave it a few minutes to see if it would break out of this cycle but I didn't hold out much hope, especially since this process normally takes just a few seconds and I had to unplug the machine. When switched back on, the DVD was knackered. Bloody hell!

Some other non-fatal problems, but things that would be nice to see improved:

• The machine doesn't record a teletext signal so no analogue subtitles are available on the recording as they are on my Panasonic NVDJ710 VCR.

• The picture is a couple of pixels higher than the source. At first it was too much to the left, which can be adjusted in the 'screen shift' in the system menu, but there's on reason why this should happen.

• You can't set an anamorphic flag, so record an anamorphic 16:9 widescreen programme (from digital TV) to the DVD and any other DVD player won't recognise it's anamorphic and allow you to set 'letterbox' within the menus and make the recording appear letterbox, so on a 4:3 TV you'll need to use the TV's own button (such as "wide") for dealing with anamorphic images. The majority of 4:3 TVs from the past few years should allow this.

• Only speeds of 4x and 32x are available for faster rewinding and fastforwarding, which isn't enough as even the Xbox does those as well as 2x, 8x and 16x. Slower speeds are available for frame-by-frame analysis, but that isn't something I use much.

I did have a problem with a couple of other discs when playing back the recording, but these occurred at the start of the disc and were down to duff ones for which I got a refund. However, it might be worth adding these problems here just in case the same happens to someone else and they're not sure if it's the player or the disc:

• The first was an SP+ recording where instead of adding one chapter every five minutes, when it got to the third one at 10:00 into the recording, the chapters showed, '3', then '4', then '5', then finally '6', all at the 10:00 mark.

  I ended up removing all chapter markers and found that it had omitted around 20 seconds from the final recording, but it's there - it just doesn't want to read it. I then finalised the disc, knowing that I'd basically wasted one, and on playing it in another player it just skipped from 08:47 to 10:00 and wouldn't play that section at all.

• On a second disc, I kept a close eye as it recorded through the 25-minute programme and the chapters were added every five minutes as expected. Then when I played it back, at around 09:06 (during chapter 2) it jumped to 09:11 and called that chapter 4. Then again, at 09:19 it paused and jumped to 09:20, now calling that chapter 6. The rest of the disc played fine though.

My Philips DVDR880 DVD Recorder, yesterday.

But overall, it's certainly worth buying a machine like this. Since I learned the hard way with a software crash after the image incident, if my TiVo's full, until a series is complete, I'll store programmes on a DVD+RW in SP until I can safely delete them. It's a bit of a kludge, but it's better to do that than risk losing an entire series in the press of a button.

Another programme I've been saving to DVD is Baddiel & Skinner Unplanned. There's just enough black screen before and after the programme and the ad breaks (well, most of the time in both cases), so you can usually get a seamless cut from one part to another. I wish my TiVo had such editing capabilities, but between them they really do go hand-in-hand.

Also, the unit is remote hackable to allow discs from all regions. I bought my machine with this as standard, the extra cost meaning it's been modified to play RCE DVDs, a trick from Warner Brothers for Region 1 discs, to try and stop the disc from working if it detects a player is multi-region all the time as opposed to region-selectable where you'll put the disc in and *then* it'll set the region.

When I bought my player, Richer Sounds price-beat an online website which, at the end of February, was selling it for £380 including delivery, so RS knocked £15 off that price. However, the standard model is now even cheaper (see the Amazon link above) and the info to make it multi-region can be found at DVD Reviewer's website here.

The DVDR880 lost a point for its once-in-a-blue-moon software crash, but when it works perfectly it's worth five stars. Perhaps Philips could resolve this issue with a firmware update disc? And add EP+ recording as well? There's no reason why it shouldn't be able to do the latter.