Customer Reviews

Philips DVDR 3400 - DVD recorder with TV tuner

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I have read some of the complaints on the Philips DVD 3400 and couldn't disagree more. The picture quality is great and stable with no artifacts at LP, which is a first for any of my previously owned DVD recorders. Besides recording to DL discs, the SPP (standard play plus) turns a 2 hour DVD into a 2.5 hr, without any possible loss of quality for those worried about the technically inferior LP mode.

You do not have to finalize RW discs for play in standard players. I have never tried to play an unfinalized +R, but who would want to. Cheap DVD players are finicky, which might be the problem experienced by a few of the previous reviewers.

Many older recorders have froze up and required unplugging to restore functions, but not this one. I use my Philips to record video and audio clips for a radio show, so I have truly beat this machine to death. Only once did I manage to freeze the recorder because I hit two buttons simultaniously. When it restarted, it indicated the problem, and allowed me to correct the mistake. Sound like a bad machine?

This recorder is a deal at the $150 range. It's reported problems baffle me.

When you only pay $150 for a DVR, you get what you pay for. The picture is full of blocky artifacts even at the high quality settings. I can't imagine what the picture looks like at the lower quality settings. The picture on my old VCR looks better than this. The recording A/D processor is only 10 bit/27 Mhz. That explains the low picture quality. The remote is a joke. It has buttons for your TV, but they only work if your TV is a Philips. I gave this 2 stars because it will play Divx discs. But the D/A video processor is only 10 bit 54 Mhz, so don't expect a great picture. Looks like Philips has turned into a "junk brand" manufacturer. Also, FYI this thing is made in China. I took it back for a refund.

My unit has the sound out of sync, froze up on chapters, had disc errors, etc!To fix these problems you need to go to the Philips website, download the latest firmware upgrade to a cd-r or cd-rw and follow the instructions from philips, after this upgrade it did fix all the problems! it did work fine after this upgrade. This unit does have great picture and sound quality through the HDMI output and RGB outputs. If you are not technical inclined then i suggest returning the unit!

I've been using all kinds of electronics since the very first IBM PC. This is my 10th (or so) DVD player and my 2nd DVD recorder. So I know my way around the world of electronic gear.

This is the worst piece of gear I have ever bought. I have a long list of gripes, but I'll just mention a couple for brevity's sake. The remote works great- if you're standing directly in front of the unit, about 6ft away. Otherwise, it's just a paperweight. It can also control your TV, if it's a Philips TV.

The machine is laughably slow to boot up, and to load a disc of any kind. It's slow to jump chapters or audio tracks, and when it's in the middle of one of these slow tasks, it won't respond to ANYTHING except being unplugged. So if you're using the remote and wondering if it's working, you have to push a button, then wait a few seconds to see if anything happens, push it again & wait, etc. This is MADDENING. Edison's wax cylinder recorder worked better than this.

I tried to program the 'timer' function to record a TV show for me every week. It did it ONCE out of six tries. During those six weeks, the 'TIMER' light was always on, and it was another maddening chore to just play a DVD. It would always load the disc (30sec) and say "Please insert blank disc for recording", even if the recording was set to occur three days away! i had to unplug the unit for several minutes to disable the timer function (after trying to do it with the remote, of course).

I could go on a lot more, but you're probably already bored. I hate this thing. I bought it to do its exact designed task, and it failed miserably.

Spend your money on a DVDR that actually works. If you really want one of these, you can have mine. For free. Seriously.

Received two of these free in a special product promotion from a local store. One of them was used once and then it never worked again. When you turn it on it displays the message 'Startup' and never gets beyond that. The other unit has worked well for a year now but has never been used for recording so I don't know what the results of that would be. The TV tuner feature has also never been used. The DVD picture quality, connected via HDMI to a 1080p TV, seems fine.

This machine is an outstanding value in the $130-$150 price range, and mine has worked flawlessly. Providing a tuner, an HDMI output, and the capability of playing and recording numerous DVD formats, it just keeps on delivering in my household. One can even plug a flash drive into it through its USB port enabling the playing or recording of material like JPEG images, MPG files, and more. If you want an inexpensive but capable machine to carry the load during the ongoing HD-DVD war, this is a great candidate.

I purchased this unit with great expectations, the picture quality was great but every 30 or so seconds the sound would drop out for a half a second on any disc I was watching. I called Philips tech support... they are clueless. I finally found a DVD recorder forum that described the exact problem I was experiencing. Buried deep on the Philips website is a series of firmware upgrades that was supposed to fix the problem with sound dropping out, my unit would get halfway through the upgrade process and freeze up. frustrated I took it back to Best Buy and purchased a Samsung, that unit is rock solid.

I'm constantly having problems with this machine.

You have to "finalize" discs so they will play on other players, and this machine is constantly coming up with "error" messages which loses whatever you've recorded.

Worse piece of electronics I've ever bought.

Deserves minus stars...

I've had this recorder for a little over a year now and can say that I am ready to move on.

The picture quality is fine. I haven't experienced any of the artifacts others have described.

My issues are with the functioning of the recorder:

First, it has always taken an extremely long time to start up--so long that we actually avoid watching anything on DVD because we know it will take a good five minutes before the machine is fully ready.

Second, the remote is horrible. The buttons don't always register when you press them and you have to aim it just right.

Third, the interface for changing the names of DVDs is very slow and doesn't have characters like apostrophes, which are useful in naming shows. It also is very limited in the number of characters you can enter for a name.

Finally, and the reason why we're going to move on, the machine has started to freeze during finalization of DVDs. It's happened to me twice now--gets to 74% and then just doesn't go any farther. I know it can take a while, so I've waited about 10 minutes before just giving up and unplugging the machine. Of course then it thinks the disc is finalized, so I can't finalize it again, but it won't play on any other machine.

Overall, this has been a very disappointing purchase.

I have the 3400, at first I was happy because the unit could burn dvd- and dvd+ but I've since had a few issues that are annoying. I purchased the unit to backup family vhs tapes and it worked fine, but the remote is poorly designed as is the editing functions, I no longer rename or add chapters because of the hassle.

The end product is decent but the resulting disc is not copyable! I've tried every dvd copy program (Nero, DVDClone, FabDVD, et al; ad nauseum) and none of them recognize the disc as a compliant format. This becomes a problem when I need multiple copies for family members. My only recourse is to re-encode the vob files in an authoring program which takes 4 hours. I may still return this unit for a different manufacturers product.