The latest generation in HDD video recorders
Written: Jun 22 '07 (Updated Oct 03 '08)
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Pros: Digital tuner, HDD recording, DVD+R/RW and DVD-R/RW recording and high-speed dubbing, 1080p upconversion
Cons: Crippling copy-protection restrictions, lack of battery backup, no program guide or automatic naming
The Bottom Line: Good value for the money, routine operation works well, but it would be a lot more useful without those imposed copy-protection restrictions.
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| Ames100's Full Review: Philips DVDR3575H/37 (160 GB) DVD Recorder / HDD R... |
This Philips video recorder is one of the latest generation with a built-in digital tuner, an update mandated by the FCC for all new models sold in the USA after March 1, 2007. It features a 160 Gbyte hard disk drive, direct recording and high-speed dubbing to both DVD+R/RW and DVD-R/RW discs, and upconversion to 1080p via HDMI output. Don't get too excited by the technology feature list though if you're new to DVD recorders - while I give this model my personal thumbs-up, you may find some of the copy-protection restrictions disappointing.
This is my second DVD recorder, and I wanted to get a model with 1080p upconversion for playing DVDs this time, as well as the built-in HDD for expanded recording capacity. In many ways I’m pleasantly surprised by how well it works. I think Philips have done a noticeably better job on the user interface testing, the user manual, and the support provided than some of the cheaper brands, even though it's made in the same Funai factory as those other brands. (Philips doesn't say who makes it, but if you check with ISOBuster you will see that the ISO label created on recorded discs is FUNAI_DVD_VIDEO.)
Pros:
- 160 Gbyte HDD records 33 to 198 hours of MPEG-2 video, depending on quality setting (same recording format used on HDD and DVDR)
- Records directly to DVD+R/RW or DVD-R/RW, and supports high-speed dubbing from HDD to DVDR
- Built in analog/digital tuner can receive ATSC and QAM digital channels directly for a higher-quality input signal
- Upconversion to 720p/1080i/1080p on HDMI output
- DivX/XVid avi playback (up to 720 x 480 x 30 fps NTSC or 720 x 525 x 25fps PAL)
- HDD allows simultaneous recording while viewing a pre-recorded program, or live TV buffering for pause/rewind.
- Good set of playback features including variable FF/RW speed, frame advance/reverse, variable skip forward/reverse (commercial skip), fast/slow-motion play with audio pitch correction, bookmarks, user-adjustable zoom.
- Reasonable set of editing functions for those who prefer to edit recordings on the unit (although users report some bugs that may need to be fixed by firmware updates)
- Decent manual
Cons:
- Several crippling copy protection restrictions, similar to other units on the market but still a disappointment (see below).
- No battery backup for the clock or recording schedule - they're gone in 30 seconds if there’s a power failure.
- No integrated program guide or ability to automatically add program names to recordings, so all recordings are programmed and initially labeled by time/date/channel only.
- Records stereo audio only, no digital surround sound recording capability (same as most other DVRs)
As for those nasty copy protection restrictions:
- Will not record or pass through High Def input signals without downconverting (so it actually receives digital HD, downconverts for recording, then upconverts for playback with the inherent loss of quality – all to satisfy our beloved media giants that you won’t copy their HD programs).
- Will not allow dubbing from commercial DVDs to the HDD, since that would require violating CSS restrictions, so you can’t use this as a DVD jukebox.
- Will not provide upconverted resolution over the component outputs due to restrictions imposed by the DVD licensing group.
- Will not record from sources using CGMS or Macrovision copy protection, including commercial VHS tapes and DVDs, and some premium cable or satellite channels (except that programs explicitly coded as “copy once” can be recorded to the HDD only, and then cannot be dubbed to DVDR).
- Plus of course the usual DVD restrictions like region coding and applying Macrovision scrambling to analog video ouputs.
It’s almost getting to the point where the list of mandated restrictions is longer than the list of features! Those with experience with previous DVD recorders may expect these restrictions, but I think they may come as an unpleasant surprise to new users.
As an upconverting DVD player it allows you to select 480p/720p/1080i/1080p output via HDMI. The HDMI digital output looks a little sharper than the 480p output from the component connectors, but the different upconverted resolutions all look very similar on my Panasonic plasma TV. In general this depends on the relative scaling performance of your TV vs. the recorder, so YMMV. The black level on the component output is fixed, but for the HDMI output you have the choice of RGB mode with enhanced or standard black level, or YCbCr mode. I use the YCbCr mode, which seems to produce the same black level as RGB standard, and more importantly the same black level as the HDMI input from my satellite receiver so I don't have to make adjustments when I switch inputs on the TV.
I was pleased to see a complete set of playback functions including slow motion forward and reverse, frame advance, and adjustable zoom. It seems a bit slower in operation than most DVD players, taking quite a long time to recognize discs initially and to display menu pages, but there's no noticeable lag within menus. A few more zoom ratios would help make it more flexible, but since the zoom quality isn't as good as my Panasonic TV, I prefer to use the TV zoom where possible anyway. It plays DivX/XVid avi files from DVD just fine (although not from CD or USB). Compatibility with VCD/SVCD discs seems good, but it has trouble playing DVD+R DL discs recorded on other equipment unless the book type of the disc was set to DVD-ROM when recorded. For some reason the FF/RW is a bit choppy on HDD recordings, but it’s smooth on DVD or DivX. It won’t play PAL DVDs (NTSC only), and there's no known region override, so you can't use it for playing foreign movie DVDs.
But you want to know about the recording functions, right?
Fortunately the news is also good on that front. Recording quality is excellent, and everything works pretty much as expected, including some of the more complex simultaneous recording and playback operations. Recording from my digital satellite tuner, I find that recordings made at SP quality (2 hours per DVD) from SD channels are virtually indistinguishable from the original. Recordings of wide-screen HD programs viewed at normal distances seem only a little fuzzier than the original, when done properly in anamorphic mode (16:9 picture squeezed to fill the 720 x 480 recording frame with no black bars). The 3575 has no function to set the 16:9 aspect ratio flag on recordings, so you must stretch wide screen recordings back to full screen using your TV's aspect ratio controls. Recording bandwidth is ultimately limited by the S-Video input to slightly less than a good commercial DVD, but in my case it's probably helped by the fact that the digital satellite transmission already uses MPEG-2 compression, so the picture is readily re-compressed by the recorder.
You can select either HDD or DVD for recording by pressing the corresponding buttons on the remote (although it would be better if it switched automatically to the HDD instead of just displaying a warning message when the DVDR you last used is no longer the tray). You can use either DVDR type for recording (DVD+R/RW or DVD-R/RW), but note that DVD+VR format is used on both. It won't record on double layer DL discs, but that doesn't matter to me. Features are very similar between HDD and DVD, except that there’s more editing flexibility on the HDD. They have exactly the same recording format/quality options, so the max recording time at SLP quality is 6 hr on DVD and 198 hours on HDD, in proportion to their relative size. There’s an Auto setting to fit recording mode to the remaining space on the DVD, but it only selects one of the standard rates rather than using a custom exact-fit rate. Just to be clear, all recordings are in Standard Def, with a best resolution of 720 x 480.
Starting a recording is as simple as pressing Record. If you are recording on the HDD, you can then go into simultaneous “chasing playback” mode by just pressing Play, which allows you to replay from the beginning while continuing to record. You are free to skip around the recording during chasing playback, and you can end chasing playback mode by pressing Stop once. You can also display the HDD index and play back any previous recording without interrupting the current recording, or even play a DVD. So simple it’s scary! I kept expecting something to go wrong, but it worked just fine.
You can schedule up to 36 timer recordings, with the usual options. Unfortunately the lack of an integrated program guide means that you have to program scheduled recordings in the traditional way, by date, time and channel/source. This requires careful coordination with the timer in your STB if you are using a separate satellite or cable tuner, and can sometimes lead to timing errors such as endings cut short or even entirely blank recordings. However, DVR models with built-in program guides such as the TV Guide system also seem to encounter lots of problems, so perhaps it’s best to keep it simple and put the ball squarely in the user’s court. At least the timer programming on the 3575 is relatively simple and straightforward. Little things like defaulting to the current date and time, pre-selecting the user-set default recording source and quality, assuming you want a stop time one hour after the start time, stepping through the fields automatically in logical order, being able to finish as soon as you have filled in the minimum necessary information - these all seem like little details, but they add up to being able to program quickly and reliably with just a few button presses. I've used some other recorders where maddening little glitches in this process frequently lead to mistakes (e.g., start time defaults to current time 7:30am, you set a start time 0f 8:00pm, bump the stop time to 09:00 manually since it doesn't default - oops, forgot to set AM to PM on the stop time, so the recording failed!). The 3575 has been a very reliable recorder for me so far - the simple timer setting procedure helps avoid mistakes, the HDD is a much more reliable recording medium than DVD, and I haven't encountered any bugs that make recording unreliable.
If you have an analog cable or OTH antenna connection, this unit can receive the time signal broadcast by PBS stations and set its clock automatically (no help with digital cable or satellite connections, of course). The PBS signal seems a bit erratic in some regions though, as users have reported lots of problems with it. The clock seems to keep reasonably good time on its own (unlike some other recorders I've seen), but even so you'll have to check and reset it a couple of times per month for recording accuracy if auto-setting isn't available for you. It does work with the new Daylight Savings Time scheme. This Philips model does not have an auto-start-on-video-signal capability - a feature found on some other video recorders which could be useful with an externally-programmed sat or cable tuner - but in practice that feature doesn't work properly with most sat and cable tuners anyway. In fact this model does not even detect when there is no video signal, and will keep on recording a disconnected input rather than pausing automatically as some other units do.
The HDD recording index table shows 6 entries per page, with up to 600 total recordings allowed. Each title entry is represented by an image box showing the initial frame of the recording. The currently-selected image box animates to show a preview of the recording, with sound. The 6 boxes on the page are numbered, but strangely the number keys don’t work to select one – you have to use the cursor keys. You can page forward and back through the title index, but if the number of recordings grows large it becomes a drawback that there’s no provision for searching by title name or date, or otherwise skipping quickly through a lot of pages. The title and information of the currently-selected recording is shown on a couple of lines across the top of the index screen, but no index list format is available. The information shown includes the name, date, time, channel/source, length, and quality of the recording. Since this unit has no ability to automatically pick up program names from either digital or analog broadcasts, and there’s no provision for specifying program names in the recording schedule, each recording is initially titled with just the date, time, and channel/source.
Of course if you are doing scheduled recording from an external sat or cable tuner, you will have to program each recording to start a minute early because of clock inaccuracies, and therefore all of the index images will either be unhelpfully blank or show unrelated commercials. This is exactly the situation for me, so the image boxes displayed on the HDD index are useless, and I have to step through them checking the recording date and time to find the one I want (hmmm, don't designers think of these things at all?). At least the recordings are always in sequential date/time order.
You can enter a new name for any existing recording using cell-phone-type keypad text entry. Some people prefer the virtual keyboard method, but either is fine with me, and the cell-phone-keypad may be faster if you’re used to texting. But it would be nice if the letter labels under the keys were bigger or backlit, or there was a keypad layout diagram on the screen. Considering that the name of an HDD recording is only displayed while the index entry is selected, and that there's no way to search for a particular name or show a list of names, title naming is of little use for HDD recordings - the primary use would be to name the titles on permanent DVD recordings. You can also select a new static index image for any title on DVD, but not on HDD.
You can have automatic chapter marks added to recordings at intervals ranging from 5 to 60 minutes. Afterward you can edit the chapter marks, deleting some and adding other new ones. On playback you can skip forward and backward by chapter, or enter a chapter number to go directly there, but there’s no chapter index with images such as you can display on some recorders.
You can use the HDD to buffer live TV for up to 6 hours, allowing you to pause/rewind/replay as much as you like during the program. There doesn’t seem to be any way to save the video buffer permanently though if you decide that you want to keep it part-way through. That’s a shame since you could have done the same thing with chasing playback if you had decided to press Record instead of Pause Live TV at the beginning.
You can dub recordings from HDD to DVD at high speed (around 4x for SP recordings), which is a direct bit-for-bit copy. You can change the data rate for more compression during dubbing to DVD, but then you can't copy at high speed. You can also dub from DVD to HDD, but not at high speed, and not commercial DVDs. You also can't dub any HDD recordings flagged "copy once" by the broadcaster to DVD.
I always record to HDD first and then dub to DVD, as I suspect most people would. That lets me preview the quality of the recording first, and it's quicker and easier to edit on the HDD. It also lets me burn multiple copies. I've used my existing batches of DVD+R and DVD+RW discs without problems (Verbatim 16x +R [MCC 004], Benq 8x +R [DAXON-AZ2], Fuji +RW [DAXON-D42]).
There's a DV input (Firewire) on the front panel for connecting a DV camera, and you can dub directly from the camera to HDD. There are also composite video and stereo audio jacks on the front panel, but no S-Video connector on the front panel.
There’s a USB host port on front panel which allows you to connect a digital camera, portable music player, or other removable storage device for viewing photos (JPEG) or playing music (MP3/WMA). Unfortunately you cannot play video files from an attached USB device - a much-requested feature that manufacturers seem reluctant to offer for some reason. You can run a slide show, but not with background music. Directory navigation is supported, but there appears to be a limit of 999 files. Since the USB port does not support video recording, video playback, or video dubbing, it's of very little use.
Editing:
You can do some common video editing tasks on recorded titles, such as adding or deleting chapter marks, deleting a title, or splitting a title in two at an arbitrary point. These functions work on HDD and DVD+/-RW, although editing tends to be slower and less reliable on DVD, and should probably be avoided if you can do it on the HDD instead. On HDD only there’s also a flexible function for deleting arbitrary scenes within titles – you can set the precise start and end point for the scene to be deleted, preview it, and then permanently delete the marked scene. It's not frame-accurate though (i.e., it can only make the cuts at key frames), so you may end up with the cut a fraction of a second off where you wanted it. On DVD you can’t use the delete scene function, but you can hide chapters so they don’t appear during playback.
There are a couple of things that could have been designed better though. There's no way to jump to a specific time index or chapter during editing, so you have to search for the place you are trying to edit with FF/RW and Chap +/-. Also playback wraps around almost instantly from the end to the beginning if you hit the end during editing, with no way back up - very annoying if you are trying to edit something near the end of the recording.
One caution: users report a bug in the current firmware that the Delete Scene function doesn't work properly in a title that has been divided using Split Title, causing the operation to fail and the title to be corrupted. It is therefore recommended not to use Delete Scene after Split Title. This bug has been known to Philips for some time, but it doesn't look as if they ever intend to fix it with a firmware update.
The built-in tuner can receive both analog and digital channels, including ATSC (over-the-air HD) and QAM (digital cable). The tuner can be set to either analog or digital mode to change how you enter channel numbers. I tested it briefly with a simple over-the-air antenna, and it seemed to pick up about the same number of analog and digital stations as my Panasonic TV, with about the same signal quality. Users report a problem that the tuner can randomly forget the all digital channels, which seems to happen when the unit is connected to a mixed analog/digital cable system. This problem is also known to Philips, who say it's a hardware problem. They have been exchanging units which have the problem, with mixed success. A digital ATSC or QAM signal provides a high-quality input for recording if available, but unfortunately digital HD must be downconverted to 480i for recording by copy protection policy. The live signal passed through to the TV is also downconverted, so you can't use this unit as an outboard ATSC HD tuner for an HDTV which lacks one.
Most types of discs and files are compatible for playback, but there are a few items missing from the supported list:
1. DVD-R DL not listed as supported for playback
2. SACD and DVD Audio formats not supported
3. The manual says it supports NTSC only, can’t play discs using other systems (including presumably PAL)
And some puzzling restrictions:
1. Music and photo files can only by played from CD and USB, not DVD
2. DivX movie files can only be played from DVD or CD, not from USB
Physically the unit is very lightly built, and while the design doesn’t exude high quality, there’s nothing obviously cheap about it. The metal case is mostly silver, with a partly-black panel on the front, but the silver disc tray stands out oddly in the middle of the black panel. The front panel design is minimal, with a simple time display, a couple of mode icons, and only a few buttons. There’s no Power On light to show obviously whether the unit is on or off (standby), so you have to look closely to see what’s on the time display. Whenever the hard drive is playing or recording video, a bright blue LED lights up on the front panel that isn’t controlled by the display dimmer – many people may find it too bright for a dark room.
Operating power consumption at 33 watts is not bad, but the Standby power consumption is a little high at 5.5 watts, and there is a distinct warm spot on the case. There’s a cooling fan on the back that runs during operation, but it’s not too noisy. You can hear the hard drive and the DVD drive spinning close up, but it’s not loud enough to hear from across the room in normal operation with the TV on. The disc tray is a bit slow and noisy to open and close, and it clicks loudly a few times while attempting to load a disc, but it works fine.
The included remote control is ok – at least it’s bigger than the mini-remotes that come with some other models, and the keypad layout does attempt a reasonable grouping with some distinguishing sizes and shapes to the major buttons. However it’s still relatively small to accommodate a lot of functions, so many of the buttons are small and closely spaced. Some functions that might be commonly used are relegated to menus instead of having a dedicated button. The translucent buttons make it look as if they should be backlit, but they aren’t. Most of the button labels are too small to read easily, especially in a dark room, and there are some rows of undistinguished identical buttons, so you’ll have to do some memorizing of which button does what. IR range and power are adequate, but not great with a single LED transmitter. It’s not a multi-device remote, and so far its control codes do not seem to be supported by other programmable remotes.
Philips provides a nice thick printed manual and a Getting Started guide. It's a bit sketchy on technical details and lacks an index, but it's a fairly complete and clear description of how to operate the unit and how to accomplish normal tasks. Only a few topics (like high-speed dubbing) are obscure.
Aside from the recorder, the remote control, and the documents, only a couple of cables are included in the box– just basic AV and RF coax, nothing expensive.
Online support is available on the Philips support web site, and includes the FAQ, the downloadable manual in pdf format, and a couple of minor firmware updates (too minor for me to even bother installing them). Their toll-free technical support number is answered promptly by someone who tries to help and doesn’t seem too dumb or argumentative – that’s already a cut above many companies. However Philips has not been forthcoming about future firmware updates to fix the known bugs, and it's looking now like there won't be any.
I've mentioned several minor bugs and design faults in this review, but overall I do like this recorder (Update: even after several months of owning it and using it a lot). It records reliably and with excellent quality, and has enough flexibility to do the things I need it to do. There are few things lacking that I wish it had, and that it probably should have had if better designed, but that's common with any bit of gear. I'm always a bit surprised that manufacturers don't seem to do enough product testing to detect issues that their customers can discover easily in the first hour of use. But Philips isn't any worse than the competition, and in this case I'd say they've done better than most. I guess that's what they call faint praise.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 270
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Epinions.com ID:
Ames100
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Member: Doug Ames
Location: Texas
Reviews written: 90
Trusted by: 8 members
About Me:
An engineer who likes thorough product research and testing
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