Great Idea, but poor performance..
Written: Dec 07 '02
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Pros: Cool idea, Cool looking device
Cons: Bad quality video, annoying controls, problems with media recognicion
The Bottom Line:
Maybe I paid too much for it, but i am not happy. I am gonna transfer all my videos to cd and sell this one on ebay.
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| r_yates's Full Review: Teraoptix TERAPIN Stand-Alone CD Video Recorder CD... |
first of all it looks kinda weird.. Its modern and stylish, but not for normal living room. For funky party room maybe or for teenager room - yes , that would be a great look.
but who cares about the look? we need features - here they are - features suck! the whole idea is very attractive..
transfer video to cd with push of one button.. but when you actualy get to it - its not so easy.. controls are confusing. Display doesnt give you any information. You will have to study manual (which doesnt explain much) very hard and use a lot of "gray matter" to figure out sveral possable ways of making this device usefull.
Anyway, lets say - you are not afraid of complexity (I am not). You study the manual. You use you "geek power". You get it all together. I have SVHS vcr, so I used SVHS connection (which is better then video/audio analog).
I took some old home video tapes (bad quality) - recorded them on CD. The quality remain as bad as it was - which makes sense. I could not see much diffrence.
But when I took my recent home videos (crisp analog quality)- after recording it on CD quality went down BIG TIME.. i mean unacceptbale drop from 100% clear to 35% pixel generated, color-distorted video. the reason for this is compression. Recorder was made this way - so you can fit something like 70 minutes on a regular CDR. 70 minutes is nice, but it quntaty over quality. It would be nice if i had an option to choose - record my with higher quality, but drop it to 30-45 minuted on CDR. There is no such option, so you make a videoCD from your Very Nice, Good Memory, Very Important Wedding video - you are stuck with crappy picture quality forever.
You dont care about how sharp the picture is? video quality i not important? Then here comes next problem. This Cd recorder doesnt want to work with 700MB CDRs!! Only 650Mb.
WHere the hell our days you are going to get an 650Mb CDR?
650 is off the market (only CDRWs are available, but they are much more expensive). I actualy was able to get it to work with some of 700mb Cds, but you cant rely on it. Sometimes is goes smooth, sometimes it starts to get stuck or skip at the end of CD, sometime CD doesnt work at all.
Its a hassle, it really is.
There are some more bugs and problems with recording process, with making chapters and finalizing CDR, but they are minor.
Sound is OK - I am not a specialist and didnt play with it as much. There is an Optical input for that (this should increase sound quality, i guess)
After all this device was a disappointment, and I am not going to keep it. I will have to look for a new solution of digitalizing my analog videos without losing quality.
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 250
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Epinions.com ID:
r_yates
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Reviews written: 4
Trusted by: 1 member
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