Customer Reviews

Philips DVDR520H DVD Recorder with 80 GB Hard Drive

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

I bought this DVD Recorder after a long research. I was looking for a +R/RW with Hard Drive at a reasonable price. In spite of any customer review available, I gambled betting on the Philips name, well established for years. I made a big mistake. The unit was unreliable from the beginning. The set-up and the first play back worked satisfactorily the first day. But the next day when I tried again, it did not work properly, starting with the Stand By/On, load/unload disc, the "Guide" menu. I couldn't even play back a commercial DVD. The buttons on the unit as well as the remote were acting strangely, not responding to the simplest commands. I tried all the tricks, including unplugging (otherwise I could not turn off, it was frozen)and replugging after a while. After several attempts and a lot of aggravation, I packed it and returned it to Amazon.com. Thanks for their return policy. The instruction manual is poorly written. The on-line support does not offer much help. The FAQs are very few and irrelevant. I did not bother to call them realizing that even the most talented expert can not offer any support in this situation. The product was defective, period. No Quality Control!There is no excuse for Philips to put on the market a unit in this state. That reminded me about another experience I had with a Philips product (Norelco shaver)which died in a few months, a thing which never hapened with my electric shavers past and present of various makes. Stay away from this product. One star rating is too much.

I thought, mistakenly as it turns out, that Philips were reknowned for reliable products. Well, that is not the case with this pile of junk. Timer recording frequently results in the unit freezing up with the only way of freeing it being to unplug it, losing that part of the program which may have already been recorded. Operation of the unit prevents use of a digital tv system when recording a terrestrial channel (if wired as shown in the manual)as the scart system is very bizzarrely configured with input only being available on 1 of the 2 scarts provided. HDD recordings at anything other than the 2 highest resolution settings produces a sound track that repeats in blocks and is therefore unusable. Even at it's second highest setting the sound playback is slightly out of sync. 5.1 theatre sound is only available in digital audio which is of no use to me as I use an anologue 4 channel surround sound system which works splendidly with my old dvd player. It also squeaks and whines in operation when it's been running a while. The on screen menus are only available in small typefaces which I find difficult to read. There are some features which are not explained in the manual. The remote control is poorly designed with the fast forward and next chapter buttons being too close together. Slow motion is a hassle to get, requiring a trip through menus!
I have to say that picture quality is superb if you can put up with the aggravation and background squeaking, which I am not prepared to do.
This is the second machine I have owned as the first was returned as faulty, although it's performance was identical in every way to this one. Many places are currently selling this model at seriously reduced prices but in my honest opinion, any price is too much for this poor quality product.

This product has a known defect for which Philips has limited support. The DVD drive would not recognize any disk. Their website ask you to download a software patch, for which you have to burn to a CDR+. I have two computers, one purchased in the past year, neither one will write to a CDR+ disk. I asked them to mail me the disk with the patch, they had no idea how they would go about doing that.

Hey Amazon, help out your customers by refusing to sell Philips products. This will definitely have a negative impact on your business. Customers with this experience will be less likely to use Amazon in the future and you will keep getting stuck with shipping expenses.

The buttons and the remote constantly freeze on this item. I thought I had a bad one and traded -- the new one does the same thing. The only way to fix it is to reset it by pulling the plug. Annoying at best after four or five times of pulling the plug in a couple of hours.

I bought and returned the DVDR520H.

1) Main problem was the loud noise from vibration when playing back R and RW discs, which made them impossible to watch. This didn't happen every time, but most. Commercial discs played back silently.

2) The machine crashes (freezes and has to be unplugged to reboot). On one occasion this happened when I programmed a recording. The recording didn't start and the controls were frozen. This means one can't have confidence programming will work. I wrote Philips to ask about software updates, got no answer until I insisted, then was sent an excerpt from the manual about how to program recording and nothing about updates.

3) Editing is unstable. A thumbnail image can be set. Then it moves by itself as much as 20-30 seconds if the file is split further on and has to be redone.

I bought a Phillips DVD recorder 2 years ago.
I had minor problems with it from the start but let them go.
A little after one year it quit completely.
Philips agreed to fix it if I paid shipping costs.
The shipping costs were more than some less expensive models at that time.
It worked well for about six months, now it has quit again.
Phillips has not mastered the art of DVD recorders.

I purchased this unit a couple of months ago and experienced the same problems many of the others here are reporting-- freeze-ups, timer issues, having to pull the plug to reset it, etc. But I checked Philips' website and found that there was a substantial firmware update available (firmware is the internal software that runs the unit.) You do have to download it and burn it to a CD (link is below.) There are some special settings required when you burn it so that the unit will recognize it, so if you're not technically inclined, get your geek friend to do it for you. Anyway, after I installed the upgrade, all the problems went away and the unit has performed flawlessly since!! I found the update on my own, so I can't comment on their tech support. I thought their instruction book was adequate, but I'm a geek. ;-)

Firmware update:
http://www.usasupport.philips.com/productDocuments.html?ProductCode=DVDR520H/37&SearchByModelNo=true

According to the Philips Global web site, this is a model produced for Europe - PAL, SECAM tuner, but recording says PAL, NTSC. AND, it specifically states on the specifications for this model that it is a REGION 2 model. Also, you cannot find it or support for it on the Philips USA web site. [...]
The star rating above should be disregarded as amazon requires a rating. I cannot rate this item, only report what I have found out about it from Philips.

Initially i was very happy with this item, it appeared to be everything i needed. However, with time, I've realised that the unit is flawed and unreliable. Phillips support is unhelpful and will not remedy the faults I have. The firmware upgrade has also not helped. The problems I have are;

1. The unit no longer recognises any 8*speed disks it writes, although it writes them adequately enough so that my other dvd player can read them. This happened after about 3 months of use. Phillips support said the unit could not support 8* disks even though there was no indication of this at the time of purchase.
2. The unit crashes a lot, particularly when editing progams. This has been a consistent problem, but seems to be getting worse with time. The only solution is to unplug the device, which necessitates a hard drive scan on boot up. I can only imagine what this is slowly doing to the hard drive.
3. Whilst writing discs which contain more than one "program", discs regularly become corrupt and totally unreadable. This doesnt seem to happen when only one program, say an M2 film is recorded onto a single disc, however try and and append several programs onto the same disc and there is a good chance the disc will die. When this happens discs are total scrap and unreadable anywhere, even cdrw. I have lost numerous recordings this way.

I will be returning my unit, and will not buy a phillips dvd recorder again. I am hugely disappointed.

I should have known better than to buy another Philips DVDR after all the problems I had with my first one. Color me stupid, I guess.
The first program I recorded on the HD ended up getting corrupted. Unfortunately, that was a continuing trend. The software tends to crash, and the only way to reset is to unplug it, which would often result in more corrupted files.
To be honest, I only had one problem with the timer, and that was remedied by reseting the software to defaults.
The DVD burner worked fine at first, but know it won't even read half the disks I have, even disks it burned itself.
I've only had it six months, and I'm already looking to replace it. I expected more from a 400-dollar piece of equipment. My 50-dollar off-brand VCR has outlasted not one but TWO Philips DVDRs. That can't be good.