Customer Reviews

Sony RDR-VX530 DVD Recorder & VHS Combo Player

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

The VX530 is a neat machine and works great. It's easy to use and, so far, produces very good results. One-touch dubbing is as easy as it gets as long as nothing is copy protected. I can vouch for this one... it's a winner.
The only thing to watch out for is buying from Amazon's vendors. The one I bought was supplied by, and shipped by, J&R Electronics. The Sony box was packaged only in a plastic bag and was received in damaged condition. Since factory boxes are usually designed for sitting on store shelves and moderate protection, and not shipping cross country, sure enough the unit was also damaged.
Maybe I had a bad day, but I found J&R Electronics not the easiest people to try to return something to. Anyway, since I was under somewhat of a time constraint, I bought one from Best Buy (and got a better price as well... on sale). The new one, of course, works fine and I'm really happy with the VX530.
Bottom line... Great machine, but be a little careful who you buy from.
Since this is a review of the VX530 and not J&R, five stars for the machine... one star for poor packaging.

It seemed pretty simple: Drop in your VHS tape, put in a DVD and press the button that said VHS->DVD. 30 minutes later, the tape is done and I go to the menu to finalize the disc. After a few minutes, I get an error saying that the media is unreadable and the disc cannot be finalized. Three DVD-R/16X discs later, I gave up and searched the net. Other people had problems with it recording to DVD-R. Even though the manual says it can handle 16X, I've got new coffee table coasters that shows it doesn't. Plus the menu interface is confusing and the not intuitive.

I purchased this unit on 3/7/2007 and returned it the same day. The picture quality is beautiful and it's a Sony, right? Precisely why I returned it. Multiple reviewers complained that the unit will not record from premium cable channels. But I took a chance anyway. I have Cablevision of Long Island, NY and this recorder will not allow a recording to be made from channels such as Starz, Encore, TCM and AMC...it will display a message about copyrighted material. I have a Panasonic and a Samsung dvd recorder....they do just fine on these channels. Sony is notorious for their so called piracy protection designs and if you want to record movies from cable movie channels........absolutely do not buy this recorder!!!

I ordered this particular unit SPECIFICALLY because it advertised the ability to read DVD+/-DL discs. Well guess what? It can't read ANYTHING. Factory DVDs don't load. Custom burned discs don't load. Factory CD audio discs don't load. NOTHING loads. I have a $200+ piece of junk that will cost me another $10-$30 to ship back to RMA to SONY. Ordered from Etronics. Verdict is still out on them (their policy is not to take opened-item returns of SONY products). Shipping was in the regular retail box, but I thought it was suspended/packaged respectably from the factory. Bottom line: major headache. Don't take a chance ordering this online. It's not worth the hassle (especially if the damn vendor doesn't take SONY a/v returns!).

I've had an amazing experience with this unit. Like everyone else, we had a house full of VHS tapes.We wanted to convert our VHS collection to DVD without a computer. The conversion job seemed beyond what I could do. Despite dire warnings about combo units, we bought this one and have had no regrets. Set up was a breeze...the schematic was excellent. 75% of our VHS tapes, even the pre-recorded ones, had no copy protection and they were very easy to dub. In the 6 months it took me to transfer the entire 500 tapes, I had not one problem with the machine. We ran it night and day.

I never thought I'd use the VHS side again but it has come in handy for recording shows that are broadcast with copy protection. Things that are distorted on disc come out fine on VHS.

Now that the gargantuan task of library conversion is done, everyone I know wants to do the same at their house. I have highly recommended this unit to friends and co-workers.

When you Dub Tape to DVD with RDR VX 530, and if you stop and restart
dubbingwhen you finalize the DVD the video picture will stall a few
seconds each time that you had stopped and started strarted dubbing.
example if you stop dubbing, to fast forward a section of tape that
you don't want (Like a Commercial etc) then restart dubbing you won't
have a smooth video, the older model RDR VX 500 this was not a problem,
in my opinion they screwed up a good dubbing machine. Plus any of sony
manuals are POORLY written and hard to follow,,,,,,,,Buyer beware!! This
problem is the reason that I could only give one star. Sony tech says
this is how it how it works when dubbing. A VARY POOR FEATURE!!

This machine was unable to load several dvds from my local video store. The same disks played on several other machines, so it was not a disk problem. On the plus side, one touch dubbing did work as advertised, but because of the inability to play commercially produced disks, I returned the machine. I've switched to a combination of a combo dvd/vcr player and a separate dedicated recorder (not Sony). Combined, they were only slightly more expensive than the single unit, and stacked, take up only slightly more space.

Got this item twice. We exchanged the first machine for a replacement one. Both machines were unable to dub the audio from the TV or from a VHS tape onto a DVD - all we got was the picture. Sony tech help on the phone said the first machine was clearly defective and to exchange it, but we had the exact same problem on the second one. (Dubbing from TV or DVD onto VHS tapes worked fine, but we want a machine for copying our family VHS videotapes onto DVD.) A HUGE disappointment, two times!

I just bought this dvd recorder and I found it very easy to use. The hook-up was very simple and had picture instuctions telling you how to hook it up. Recording is by one touch of a button, can't beat that!!! That is too easy. The only complain is that when it is transferring my videos on to the dvd, it stops tapping to index it, and sometimes it will record the flicker and sometimes, it would record what's on the television by mistake. It is only in-between video dates. e.g. If your date is 2/2/07, after it is done recording that date, it will stop taping and index it, and start at your next date, 2/3/07 where it starts and rewinds to find 2/3/07. That is where you would find the flickering (where it is rewinding and forwarding to find 2/3/07, and starts recording before the tape tracking is done), and when it might record what's on the television. This annoyance is only for less than 1/2 minute. So, your dvd recordings will not look very professional. I paid $197.99 for this machine, so shop around.

Nothing but problems with this unit almost from the start! It won't record in a single title: When the recording is done there appears about 3 or 4 titles on the title list. none of them complete. I have to do the recording once or twice more ( DVD+RW ) in order to obtain a complete copy. On playback ( all discs ) the movie will "freeze" at various times making it necessary to eject the disc, re-insert it, and chapter through to where I was.

Sony's customer service people were of no assistance whatsoever! Completely indifferent to the problem, and what finished me with them was their refusal to honor the warranty. They told me the warranty was for 90 days only. I reminded them I had a 1 year warranty with the unit which I filed with them the same day of purchase. Their reply was that I could ship the unit to them, at my own expense, and for $65/hr they would repair it. At that point I ended the conversation and unplugged the unit. I will replace it with another brand.

We have been long time Sony customers. Until now I've never had a warranty issue but now that I know how poorly they address such issues there will never be another Sony product in our home.