Not Professional Quality
Written: Dec 10 '04
|
Product Rating:
|
|
| Sound: |
 |
|
| Ease of Use: |
 |
|
| Picture Quality: |
|
|
| Durability: |
|
|
|
Pros: Hard Drive recording, DV (firewire) Input.
Cons: Too many to list, see the body of this review.
The Bottom Line: Works well for recording from a DV camera to a DVD. Poor for other uses.
|
|
|
| dgrimes's Full Review: Pioneer DVR510HS (80 GB) DVD Recorder |
After reading the reviews, I determined the Pioneer DVR-510H was the right DVD recorder for me. But the deck did not meet my expectations. This recorder works best for those wanting to copy video from a mini-DV camera with a Firewire port to a DVD.
First use out of the box was to record a movie and a baseball game off the air. I set the timer but neither program recorded. I later checked the recorder and tried manually entering into record. The recorder gave me an error that the signal was copyrighted. I was able to eventually start the recording, but had I not been there, I would have missed both. Later I used it to record a long auto race, but the recorder stopped on its own before the race finished (6 hrs.), so I missed the ending. I continued to record (mainly to the internal hard drive) other sporting events with some success, and other times not. I gave up and went back to my VHS recorder.
On the plus side, when recording to the hard disk, it was easy to start watching a program from the start as the hard disk recorded the program in progress. I liked being able to start the recording of a sports event while I was away, and be able to start watching it from the beginning, even if the event had not yet finished.
Ironically, my VHS recorder records about the same video and audio quality as the DVD recorder when both are set to EP. When using finer settings on the DVD, it outperforms VHS in SP mode.
The tuner is not very sensitive, either. Using regular rabbit ears for the antenna, my Panasonic VHS will deliver a much better picture than the Pioneer DVD recorder. An amplifier or antenna with gain is necessary to get a clean picture off the air. If you have cable and you get a good picture with it, this recorder should do okay.
This equipment works okay for burning your home movies to a format you can take on the road. However, video is my profession, and this equipment will be disappointing to those wanting to use it to record DVDs for distribution. I taped a series of lectures and thought this would be an easy way to go from my professional DV tapes to DVD in a simple way. While it is easier than authoring DVDs on a computer, using this DVD recorder will not produce as good of results.
The MPEG encoder has a problem dealing with fade ups from black. The video in the fade is very blocky. Also, if one divides the video, a frame or two will become blocky about half a second after the break.
Audio quality is very good and handles high fidelity stereo audio in finer modes. The video quality in FINE mode is very good, almost as good as DV (or mini-DV). However, a disk burned at this quality does not work on all DVD players. The data rate is too high for some players to handle. Selecting SP mode is better for compatibility. Unfortunately, the video quality does drop a little. The quality drops even further if a setting below SP is used.
The recorder has editing and titling capabilities. The menus are cumbersome and slow, but fairly intuitive. Clips can be cut and assembled, but the DVDs are slow to jump from chapter to chapter, so don't make the clips too small. There is a menu setting that makes it quicker, but there are still long pauses between titles so separate clips will still pause between cuts.
Don't try to set chapter points within a clip, the DVD recorder will not record them so it is a waste of time. Auto-chapter points put way too many chapters in so I used a setting that put a chapter point in every 10 minutes. While it worked, I wish I could select where I wanted the chapters.
Reliability has been excellent. Out of over 200 disks burned with this recorder, all are usable and only a few have glitches which might be more accountable to the disks themselves rather than the recorder. The recorder works well with both 2X and 4X disks.
Because of the problems with timer recording I cannot recommend this recorder for program recording. Because of the insensitive tuner, don't use with an off-air antenna. And don't try to get professional level DVDs from this machine.
Do consider it if you have a DV camera with firewire and want to easily assemble large clips onto DVD. Avoid short clips. It also works fine to dub non-commercial DVDs.
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 500
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
dgrimes
|
|
Reviews written: 12
Trusted by: 0 members
About Me:
A video engineer by profession but my interests are broad.
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.