A Solid, Well-Designed DVD Recorder
Written: Jan 21 '04 (Updated Jan 21 '04)
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Pros: Excellent user interface, DV in/out, Good JPEG viewer, excellent recording quality
Cons: Accurate edit points mean no high-speed dub from HD to DVD.
The Bottom Line: This recorder is one of the best values on the market today. The design is very well thought out and its performance reflects this attention to detail.
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| jethrog35's Full Review: Pioneer DVR510HS (80 GB) DVD Recorder |
The Pioneer DVR-510H is a relative newcomer to the standalone DVD recorder market and thus has had a good look at the competition. Its primary rivals, the Panasonic DMR-E100HS and the DMR-E80H, have already established a sound following among videophiles and appear to be excellent products. The DVR-510H, however, seems to offer better value when you look at all the features you get for the money. We’ll look at some of these features a bit later in this review, but now that you’re considering the purchase of a DVD recorder, it’s worthwhile to look into what is happening in the industry first.
A Little Background on DVD Recording:
When it comes to DVD recording, there are several competing disc formats. There’s DVD+R/RW, DVD-R/RW, and DVD-RAM who are the top contenders. Sony and Phillips are really pushing the DVD+R/RW formats, while Panasonic and Pioneer are pushing DVD-R, though Panasonic uses DVD-RAM for rewritable discs while Pioneer uses DVD-RW. Generally DVD-R is considered to be the most universal format, but Sony disputes that based on their sales numbers.
Panasonic has always reaped an advantage from its DVD-RAM format since it permits one to watch a program from the beginning while it’s still being recorded. This is a real plus for recorders that do not have a hard drive, but not a big deal for recorders that do. In order to compete, Pioneer has its own “VR” format that provides this feature for DVD-RW disks.
You may ask, “why all the different formats of DVD?” Well, the answer is royalties. Whichever company establishes the “standard” gets to collect royalties from the other companies, which can be quite significant. Buying a DVD recorder right now should be viewed as something mainly for personal use. You may eventually have to copy your DVDs to the ultimate winning format.
It’s worth noting that DVD+R/RW and DVD-RAM formats have recently lost the standards battle with the DVD Forum, a worldwide organization that promotes DVD technology, though the actual war isn’t over yet in the marketplace.
Now on with the review…
DVR-510H Picture Quality:
Most of my observations for picture quality have been made on a high-end 34” wide-screen Sony (KV-34XBR800). This TV makes cable TV look very good, even on weak signals, so my observations on picture quality must be considered with this in mind. I’ve seen how awful cable TV can look on larger screens, so it’s possible that small differences in recording quality may be more noticeable on these screens.
All that being said, recording quality on the DVR-510H is superb. Recording a cable broadcast to either the hard drive or directly to a DVD-R/RW disc yields a picture that is indistinguishable from the source for recording level 21 (“SP”) and up (there are 32 levels). One nice feature is that you can preview the picture quality for a given recording level without actually recording. Audio is recorded in Dolby Digital 2ch format, except at recording level 32 where it’s recorded in Linear PCM format (the best format).
Note that even at level 1 (“EP”), the video is quite decent, roughly equivalent to a VCR tape in EP mode, even a little better. It’s interesting to note that colors become more “brittle”, kind of like reducing the number of colors that your computer monitor displays, and the video is a bit scratchy. Videophiles will find any level less than 9 (“LP”) totally unacceptable, quoting digital artifacts and mosquito noise, but I can still enjoy a movie at level 1 on my 34” TV. I agree, however, that on larger screens (such as the 50” demo unit at the store) the digital artifacts and noise are certainly very noticeable below recording level 9.
There have been reports in various bulletin boards that the Panasonic units seem to do a better job with the picture at low recording speeds (“LP” or lower). I’ve not had a chance to do a side-by-side comparison, but the continuing debate about picture quality suggests that the difference is small and is more a matter of the manufacturer’s engineers choosing different recording levels at which they lower the resolution of the recording. With the size of the hard drives going into today’s units, the issue of recording quality at low recording levels becomes less important. I simply won’t accept a noticeable degradation in picture quality for my archived videos, so all my DVDs are burned in SP quality or better, even if it means using more DVDs to save a particular movie.
Recordings from the composite and S-video inputs are quite good with no noticeable degradation in picture quality compared to sending the video directly to the TV.
Tests with Digital Video Essentials show that the recorder is not capable of displaying “blacker than black” video during playback, making it difficult to calibrate black level. However, its color output is quite accurate, with no bias toward any color (unlike my Panasonic RP-62 player that tinkers with the red level through its component outputs). I found no need to adjust its hue setting to meet my TV’s calibration settings.
Now let’s look at some of the major features of the unit along with my experience with them:
What’s Good:
1) An 80 Gb hard drive (HD). This will give you up to 102 hours of recording at level 1, but realistically, if you like your recordings to “sparkle” you’ll want level 21 or higher, which starts you at 34 hours and goes down to 17 hours at level 32.
2) High-speed DVD recording (up to 4X). This translates into 15 minutes for a 1-hour recording at level 32, or 2.5 minutes for a recording at level 1.
3) High-speed disc copying (non-copy protected discs only). Even if you’ve had to create your original disc using a real-time dub (see “What’s Not So Good” below), you can make perfect digital copies at 4X speed. I’ve had great success with this, and haven’t created a single “DVD coaster” yet (using Memorex DVD-R discs).
4) Chase play. This is sweet, and is standard on any DVD recorder with a hard drive. I’ve now got into the habit of recording a show even as I watch it, just in case the phone rings. I simply press the “Record” button a sufficient number of times to record the whole show (in 30-minute increments), go chat for a while (when inevitably interrupted), and come back and hit the play button to watch what I missed while it finishes recording the rest of the program. This also gives me the advantage of skipping over commercials during playback. Similarly, if you’ve programmed a timed recording and you arrive home halfway during the program, there’s no need to wait for the recording to finish before you watch the show.
5) Simultaneous recording and playback. The HD and the DVD are independent. So I can watch a movie from one while recording to the other.
6) A history of the last 30 discs that I’ve recorded with the remaining recording time on each. This is handy when I’m looking for a disc with enough free space to fit a particular show.
7) Customizable picture controls. The DVR-510H allows you to customize its white and black levels, picture detail, color saturation, tint, noise reduction (for recording old VCR tapes) and various other picture settings. This is great when you’ve calibrated your TV against one DVD player and you have the recorder as a second unit. You can repeat the calibration, but only adjust the recorder’s settings without having to play with the TV’s service menu. I’ve used this feature to fine-tune both the tuner and DVD-playback picture quality.
8) Records up to 32 programs up to a month in advance. You can use VCR Plus+ or simply do this manually. Timer recording is really easy to do.
9) Optimized recording level. If enabled, and you’ve set a timer recording for longer than can fit on a disc at your desired recording level, the unit will automatically adjust the recording level to make the recording fit.
10) Auto-start recording from a satellite receiver. There is an input on the back of the unit that, when enabled, will detect when video is present from a set-top box and start recording it, then stop when the video stops. This way only the timer on your set-top box needs to be programmed. I’m not on satellite, but this feature appears to work around problems that RCA has had with their DRS-7000N (now the DRC-7005N) hard-drive recorder. RCA uses an IR-blaster to try to control the satellite receiver, but this approach doesn’t seem to work with all satellite receivers.
11) DV output/input for recording to/from a camcorder. You have a pure digital data transfer for top-notch archiving of DV tapes. Purists will scoff that your DV data has to be encoded to MPEG-2, thus losing quality, but analog inputs have to go through this as well. DV is the way to go! I’ve also experimented with connecting my Firewire output from my laptop to the DV input of the DVR-510H. I used Windows MovieMaker 2 to make a nice movie clip, but found that MovieMaker won’t output to the DVR-510H. We have a standoff where the recorder won’t start recording until it gets a signal over the Firewire, and MovieMaker won’t send a signal until the recorder says its recording! Moreover, the recorder doesn’t see the laptop as a camcorder, so I have to manually enable its DV input rather than use the “DV Record” option on its main menu. The only workaround that I’ve found to date for transferring video via Firewire from my laptop is to save the video to DV-AVI format under MovieMaker, then use WinDV (a Freeware utility) to blast out the video to the DVR-510H. Fortunately video capture works great through the DV port. I simply start a playing a recording on the DVR-510H, and the video is passed through the DV port to my laptop. MovieMaker records beautifully.
12) HD acts as a backup recorder. Let’s say that you’ve loaded a recordable DVD disc and set up a timer recording to record directly to the disc. If the disc is unusable (for whatever reason), the DVR-510H will still record the program to the HD.
13) Simple, non-destructive editing. If all you want is to edit out commercials and perhaps rearrange the order of some pieces of video, then this recorder is for you. Don’t look for any special transition effects such as fade-in/out, blend, etc. Editing is done through a “Play List” or a “Copy List”, so that the actual source material is never touched. The edited version simply points to various parts of the original content.
14) A JPEG picture viewer that actually works well. You have to burn your CDs as a “music project”, preferably in “disk-at-once” mode, rather than setting up the CD as a data disc. If you do this, then pictures can be viewed at a rate of one picture every 10 seconds (there’s no adjustment for the viewing interval that I’ve found). The unit buffers 4 pictures, regardless of file size, so you can back up for instant viewing of the last 4 photos. Note that large photos take longer to display. My 4 mega-pixel camera takes 2Mb photos in its best quality setting, and these pictures take 15 seconds each to be loaded. The nice thing is that after the first picture, subsequent pictures do not display until they are fully loaded (so there is no “unraveling” of the picture as it’s loaded). Pictures are rendered beautifully, which is worth mentioning since a number of photo viewers yield very grainy pictures, regardless of the resolution of the photo being displayed.
15) Excellent user-interface. The manual is well written but almost not necessary (at least for basic operations) as the screens are virtually self-explanatory.
16) To keep up with changing trends in DVD technology, Pioneer offers free firmware updates for up to three years after purchase. This is a real bonus as DVD technology is rapidly changing and so much of the unit’s functionality is controlled by firmware.
What’s Not So Good:
1) Restrictions on high-speed recording. If you are editing out commercials and you want to hit the “fade to black” right on the black frame, then you’ll probably end up doing a real-time dub from the HD to the DVD-R disc. This is because you’ll need to set up the recorder in “Frame Accurate” mode, which generally does not permit you to do a high-speed dub. If you leave Frame Accurate off, then your edit points will only be accurate to within a half-second. Fortunately the recorder still shows you where the edit point will be, so you can choose if you want the commercial to flash up momentarily (yuk!) or if you want to crop some of the “fade-to-black” (yielding a somewhat choppy playback of the finished product).
2) Only records 2 audio channels (but supports playback of full-surround Dolby Digital and DTS from a commercial DVD).
3) Only takes S-video as its best quality analog input. It has component out, but no component in (like some of the Phillips units do).
4) Progressive scan. This is supposed to be a good thing, but with my Sony TV I don’t use it. The Virtual Reality Control on the TV (or “VRC”, a customizable de-interlacer) does a much nicer job of making the picture look crisp and clear than the simple line-doubler on the DVR-510H (no Faroudja chip here!). For playing DVDs, I use the progressive scan output from my Panasonic RP-62 since its Faroudja chip beats the Sony VRC. However, for the DVR-510H, I leave the output set to “Interlace”. You’ll have to try it on your TV to see if it works for you.
5) There is no TIVO on this unit, or GemStar listings. TIVO is not a big deal for Canadian customers (since we STILL don’t have it!), but GemStar works in Canada and would be nice to have, even if it’s not as powerful as TIVO.
6) It would be nice if the recorder would have a mode where you can start DV recording without any signal being present. This would help work around the problem with computer software waiting for the recorder to signal that its recording before sending any video. However, this is not an issue if you are connecting a camcorder, since the DV input is designed for this.
Conclusion:
A better product is always just around the corner. Panasonic should be releasing new units next spring/summer which will no doubt go one step further than the DVR-510H. There is talk of dual-layer DVD recorders coming out near the end of 2004, which will effectively double the recording time on recordable DVDs. If you’re looking to purchase anything electronic, only buy when you really need it. For me, I just couldn’t go back to VHS after my last HD recorder (not a Pioneer) died.
From my research, the DVR-510H has virtually all the features of the top-of-the-line Panasonic DMR-E100HS, with the biggest exception being the size of the HD that is installed. If you’re not too stuck on the “bigger is better” concept, then you should have an excellent recorder for only a fraction of the price.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 600.00
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Epinions.com ID:
jethrog35
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Reviews written: 4
Trusted by: 2 members
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