Philips' New DVD-Recorders

Philips just demonstrated two DVD-Recorders, based on DVD+RW technology, at the annual Custom Electronic Design Installation Association Show (CEDIA ). The DVDR1000 comes in a silver casing and the DVDR1500 is dressed in black and includes Philips Pronto Pro Intelligent Remote Control. Both units have a built-in TV tuner, an AC-3 decoder/encoder, and use Variable Bitrate recording (VBR) with four different time settings. VBR adjusts the data rate of the recordings based on the amount of motion in the recorded material. In recordings with rapid movement, VBR decoding tries to reduce pixelization. Both also use Philips' Crystal Clear Pro Progressive Scan with a Motion Adaptive System that's supposed to correct for artifacts. Using Philips' new DVD burners, you can record up to two hours of content on a single 4.7 GB DVD+RW disc in DVD quality and up to four hours of what the company says is "better-than-VHS quality" footage. The units will also burn double-sided discs with a 9.4 GB capacity, which allows a total of up to eight hours of recording. The recorders include a digital i.Link data transfer connection (IEEE1394) for transferring camcorder footage to DVD and include a component video input for analog recordings. DVD+RW media is interchangeable between the PC and TV platforms, so you can record something with your camcorder, copy it onto a DVD+RW disc, edit it on a PC (assuming you're got another DVD+RW unit in your computer) and play it back on most DVD-Video players and DVD-ROM drives. In addition to DVD+RW and DVD-Video discs, the DVDR1500 and DVDR1000 also are compatible with CD, CD-R, CD-RW, S-VCD and VCD discs.