Customer Reviews

Centrios DVD Recorder (EDW8020) (EDW8020)

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I've been using this DVD Recorder for 2 weeks now after getting one for fairly cheap. It has lots of connections for hooking up a comcorder, hooking it up to a TV, it's a progressive scan DVD player as well but I bought it for recording TV to DVD. So these are the functions i will talk about specifically. First off, it takes DVD+RW's so you can re-record over the DVDs after you watch them. So you don't need to keep buying new DVD's to write to.

Formatting the DVDs to make them work in the recorder is kind of tempermental. Sometimes the unit will accept a new unformatted dvd, and other times it'll just keep spitting them out. I've found if you turn the power off before it spits the DVD out and turn the unit back on, you can then format the disc. Other times however when i use a blank disc, it works normally. It's really hit or miss if it's minimal or maximum effort to format a DVD.

You can have up to 15 record events and each event can repeat which is nice. So if you have a show on every say monday at 8pm, you can do a repeating record record for that show. YOu can also say pick to record monday, wednesday and firday at 8pm on a certain channel if you want.

YOu can also select the recording quality giving you anywhere from 1 hour to 3.5 hours depending on teh settings. I use the LP option which gives you about 3 hours per disc and the quality is fine, i play back on a laptop on the train to work.

Some issues i've run into are as follows. When i go to erase the disc after it's been recorded too, sometimes the DIsc Utilities menu is visible and sometimes it's not. I've found you have to hit the stop button at he main menu before you can use disc utils and format. This may be by design but it doesn't mention this in the manual so you're left to figure it out on your own.

Recording also seems to be iffy. First you have to put 2 minutes between shows if you're recording 2 different channels, say channel 2 from 8-9 and channel 3 from 9-10.

The record scheduling seems to work only half the time, it depends on if it reads the DVD properly when it tries to turn on. If it turns on and loads the DVD properly, then recording will start on schedule. BUt if for some reason it doesn't load the DVD properly, it doesn't attempt to reload the dvd, it just shuts off. It seems to be at random if it reads the DVD or not even if it's formatted ready to go. Half the time i have ot manually turn the thing on and manually hit the record button. So it's not all that relaible for scheduled recording which is a big disappointment.

Although the price was right (i paid 120 for it) and the features are right, it being unreliable and tempermental prevents me from recommending this particular product to anyone.

Now I'll admit first off that I bought this used off ebay for $40. I use it pretty much everyday though. It records well and is really easy to use for the most part. I mostly use it to back up things from my dvr to clear up some space. I've yet to set it on the highest quality setting and only use the lowest quality setting as it fits more on to your dvd. Even with it's low quality setting the videos and such that i've burned look really good. I have no complaints about this except one and that's that every once it a great while when you burn a dvd with a lot of titles it sometimes screws up the menu and thereby pretty much trashing the disc. In all the discs i've burned on it (around 60+) only about 3 or so have done this. Of course it sucks to put work into a dvd only to lose it in the end it doesn't really matter with the price of blank dvds. If you do pick this up one thing i've found is that any blank DVDs must be of the DVD+ variety and not the DVD- kind. It will not format the DVD- discs for anything. Recording itself is easy done. Just push the record button on your remote appox. 1-2 secs before you want the title to start and push stop when you're done. You can also rec and pause and then rec some more on the same title which is good for editing out commercials. Overall I do recommend this to anyone looking for a fairly decent DVD recorder on the lower end of the pricing specturm.