Customer Reviews

Samsung DVD-HR720 DVD Recorder

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I have owned this unit for about a month now, and am very satisfied with its overall performance.

As a basic DVD player, it is excellent. The only two minor gripes I have are that the time for loading a disc is a little long, and it does not show time remaining on a disc. Picture and sound quality are outstanding.

As a DVD recorder, I have used it both to record shows off of cable TV, and to transfer home movies from VHS videotape to DVD. It does both very well. The main gripe I have is that I cannot place chapter points where I want; the unit does that automatically. I first copy the videotape to the hard drive, and then burn a DVD of the entire tape at high speed (this takes about 25 minutes for a 2 hour tape). Then I go through the material on the hard drive and edit out as much of the boring stuff as possible. This usually reduces the 2 hours of material from one VHS videotape down to about 30 minutes. Editing is a straight forward, although very time consuming process. Every time a portion of a recording is edited out, the unit takes the user back to the beginning of the recording, and you have to scan forward to where you left off to do more editing. Once editing is done, I then combine the remaining materials into a "highlights" DVD. Please note that when combining edited materials like this, the only chapters placed on the disc are between the edited materials derived from each tape. Therefore, for me that means a highlights DVD only will have 4 chapters if the disc is recorded in SP (2 hour) format.

I also used the iLink/Firewire connector to transfer material directly from my Sony Digital 8 camcorder to DVD. Since a Digital 8 tape only holds 1 hour of extemely high-resolution material, I used the XP (1 hour) DVD format. The picture is incredible. In the future, I may record using SP if the picture is almost as good.

The last part of the unit is the hard disc, which uses TV Guide to record shows. I have read many horror stories on-line about this, and I did have problems the first couple of weeks. Sometimes the unit would not load new listings overnight like it was supposed to. And it did not record a show or two when I believed that it was going to. But once the TV Guide became fully populated with listings, it seemed to work as expected. Once I noticed that the unit added listing during the daytime, not overnight. And it will begin recording shows even if you are watching a DVD or another show on TV. Of course, I love watching a show at the same time that show is recording (chase play).

As I have read on-line reviews for most other units, the hard disc fan for my Samsung seems to run all the time. However, it is very quiet and not a problem at all.

Overall I am very satisfied with this unit, and I enjoy playing with it.