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I've seen this demo-ed and it looks quite good, but I doubt anyone but early-adopters will be tempted at £1200 - I mean that's more than a very good PC for Pete's sake! Let's hope they fall in price as quickly as DVD players did, you can pick these up for just under £100 now - and let's hope they can sort out the standards (all we need now is another betamax/vhs war).

Slight correction, it's actually £1299.99 (but when it's that price to start with, another hundred makes little difference!).

[wicket]

No I wouldn't buy it, I would rather buy Sky+ and use this for recordings and stick to getting good quality dvds of favourite films.

[Orbitalzone]

Yes, we've seen it all before, pay a lot to be the first, then a year later it's half the price, twice as good and comaptible with other players!

I think it's best to let the Japs fight it out until one clear winner emerges. Give it 5 years and they'll be a few hundred pounds. Assuming Hard Disk recording (or other solid state recording) doesn' take the place. I wonder how much more control will be used to stop copying onto DVD. I bet it won't be easy to copy anything onto it other than normal TV, not Sky box office mind you....

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Quote:

Originally posted by Orbitalzone
I think it's best to let the Japs fight it out until one clear winner emerges.

The Japs? This particular model is made by Philips!

[squidgy]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I can't imagine that this thing records "on-the-fly" like you do with videotapes, does it? Presumably it has to buffer stuff beforehand, no? So what happens if there's a powercut during a recording? With VHS, what you had recorded up to that point can be played back. I very much doubt you can do this with this DVD recorder gizmo. Unless someone cares to correct me?

It might have features that come in handy if you want to master your own home-made films properly that you already have on VHS or computer hard disk, but if you're just interested in taping the soaps off the telly, or security camera footage, I'm convinced it's a waste of money.

I don't think DVD will ever replace the "on-the-fly" recording functionality of VHS. Something else may replace it, though, after all, it's not exactly difficult to program your compy to make an AVI or MPEG file from your TV card in advance, so that it does it whilst you're out, and keep it on the hard disk until you get around to watching it. However, as orbitalzone suggest, I think maybe some other kind of recording medium might be developed, such as flash memory or something. You could record "on-the-fly" with that, so maybe that could rival VHS in the future.

[chimaera]

Quote:

Originally posted by squidgy
I don't think DVD will ever replace the "on-the-fly" recording functionality of VHS. Something else may replace it, though

It already has! I haven't used my S-VHS VCR since a year ago when I got TiVo.

As you say, writeable DVD is intended for archiving, not timeshifting.

[Jay-Dee]

at the moment i wouldnt buy one even if they were £200-300
there are just too many formats to choose from that will end up being obsolete
i do think that dvd-r will probably win in the end but there are drives from panasonic using dvd-ram
the philips uses dvd+rw
there is also another version from sony and some other companys called dvd-rw

what would be ideal is that a player would support them all
i would imagine that the winner would be the one with the cheapest price to space perfomance...

[squidgy]

I take your point JayDee ... however, if you want to invest in some kind of media storage for the purpose of archiving your own files, rather than playing those created by other people, then the possibility of obsolescence really isn't a problem. Ok, you might find it difficult to get parts in the future if the player goes wrong, but if a new, better storage medium becomes available, you can just transfer all your stuff from the old medium onto the new one.

For example, the 5.25 inch floppy disk is pretty much obsolete now. However, you will have had plenty of opportunity to transfer old files from 5.25 inch to 3.5 inch before that happened, which, in turn, you may have stuck on your hard disk or CD-ROM. This doesn't mean that there was no point in 5.25 inch when it was the only practical medium available. I'd say that the same thing applies to CD-ROM and DVD-RAM now .... if you've got stuff that needs to be stored somehow, then you need a way of storing it, it's that simple. But if you haven't, then there's no point in investing in something to store files you don't have.

[Kevo]

NO, I mean...what is the point of a recordable DVD that only has an analog tuner !!!!

Kinda defeats the object if you ask me, and for 'only' £1300.

And don't anybody say....
"well, you can hook it up to a digital STB " (AAARRRGGHHH !!!!)

Nah, hard disk recoding is the future.