Review by ronk - 17th December 2004
Rating: 2/10

Review based on 7 days usage of Lite-On LVW-5045.

Conclusion: High Tech meets Stone Age user interface

Major Problem with machine I received: Itl not play DVDs (-R) recorded on a PC. These DVDs play perfectly on my Sony and Yamada DVD players but cause the LiteOn to go into a read loop which displays nothing on the TV, and locks all input from the Remote Control or the Fascia buttons. The only way to extract the DVD is to unplug the machine from the mains, wait a few seconds, plug it back in (it has no On-Off) switch. And when it finished checking the hard disc for errors it will accept an Eject command from the Remote. Am awaiting replacement machine to see if this is a fault on my machine or a design feature.

Pros:
1. Good Record Quality if kept to SP mode – 2 hours per DVD or 66 hours on Hard Disc. Forget the claims of 198 hours recording
2. Can edit recordings, inc. hiding Adverts, and copy HDD recordings to DVD for archive to free HDD space

Cons:
1. User interface is awful, set up is entirely manual and long winded. Programming recordings is painful. The designers have obviously never seen a good VCR user interface. When I first plugged in my Panasonic SVHS VCR it auto set the date time, selected the country of use and configured all 5 terrestrial channels correctly to 1 –5. Took less than 5 mins with no user interaction required. The LiteOn makes you set the date and time manually, then you select the country and initiate a manual channel scan. You then have to manually rearrange the channels to the correct sequence 1-5. And with a Remote Control which repeats if you press the keys a fraction to long all this took over 30 minutes.
2. Setting VideoPlus recording is also tortuous. On my Panasonic remote you press V+, enter the code and transmit – job done in 10 secs. To set the LiteOn takes a several of minutes. First you have to turn the machine on and wait for the hard disc to spin up – Why?. Then dozens of key presses to select V+, enter the codes, then confirm every previous setting individually. And this for every programme you want to enter, the machine remembers your previous settings but does not automatically use them unless told otherwise.
3. The Editing facilities while useful are also much more difficult to use than need be and the touchy buttons on the remote make the job much harder than it should be, as repeat button transmissions toggle functions at the speed of light so you have to go slow and recheck every step
4. The User Manual does not explain many of the settings which appear on the screen, without experience of various VCRs, a PC based PVR system and much IT and Audio experience I would have had great difficulty setting this thing up.
5. Despite much effort I could not get the machine to reliably read my PC recorded DVD films -which play perfectly on my Sony and Yamada DVDs. To get it to read them at all I had to set the machine to Multi-Region mode (which is not documented in the manual – see AMAZONs machine description) and then sometimes it would play a disc and another time it would not. Worse still when it refused to read a DVD it gets stuck in an infinite loop with a STOP message on the fascia and a READING message on the TV. In this state it will not accept any commands from either the Remote or the Fascia buttons meaning that you have to physically unplug the mains lead, wait, and then plug it back in. This causes the machine to go into a HDD self test and then if you are quick you can issue an Eject command from then remote before the machine start to read the DVD again and return to the infinite loop.
6. Oh! While beauty is in the eye of the beholder – its as ugly as a brick.

Review by downwind - 30th March 2005
Rating: 1/10

My Letter to LiteOn.

Dear LiteOn,

The other month I purchased an HDD/DVD Recorder LVW-5045 from Costco @ $349.00 This seemed a good buy at the time. I am sorry to have to tell you that it has proved not to be the case.

I have given this piece of equipment a thorough testing for a month and yesterday decided to take my machine back to exchange it for another LVW-5045 to see if I perhaps had a dud....In fact, the one I picked-up yesterday is even worse than the one I took back.

"So what's the problem I hear you ask"? Please Read on...

1, The first thing I noticed was that the sync between the picture and sound was sometimes off. This of course is highly annoying.

2, Next is the wishy washy picture quality viewed directly through the unit and monitored on the TV, (NOT A RECORDING), but live. What happens is that when the picture (live TV) turns to a dimly lit scene, the colors as so faded that parts of the screen actually turn Black & White. This will get recorded like that as well. Not good.

3, Crash, crash, crash... Yep, that's right. You make a big deal of the fact that this machine can record hours & hours of programs, but it crashes nearly all the time when you split the file up into separate segments. This is a major problem when I have recorded one particular TV channel for 5 or 6 hours, only to find that when splitting the file, it tells me of a disk error and I have lost the lot. It will handle smaller time frames no problem. I'm not sure what that time frame limitation is, but single films work okay in general.

4, HDD to DVD High Speed. Well that's another little fib. I don't call 15-20 minutes for one film particularly quick, do you?

5, My latest machine....acquired yesterday....has all of the above problems and one more to boot. It would seem that the compression ratios have all been knocked down a step or two. What I mean by this is that the tests I have run on all the different compressions settings perform to a worse standard than the first machine. This is very odd, as the model is the same? You tell me.

6, With this new machine, I have installed the latest firmware, downloaded from your site, and there is no apparent visual or technical upgrade in performance. All very vexing.

7, May I also ask, why you make such a big deal of the NTSC/PAL compatibility, when the unit only runs 110V. I don't know of anywhere that has PAL and is on 110V ?. I would like to take this unit with me to the UK and Spain with ease without purchasing a different power adapter. Further to this, I have a Sony PAL DV camera and it won't work through any of the inputs properly. The worst being the DV input, which doesn't work at all, and which would have been nice. My NTSC DV camera works okay, but not in 16:9 only 4:3. This is also disappointing.

I think my main question is "why is this product out in the market place"? It needs further work to rectify the many problems. It has potential to be a great machine and great value for money if only your firmware updates dealt with all the above.

And lastly of all, having read your customer service notes on your website, I see that you do not reply to individual emails, but rather post the question and answer on your site. In a word, this is simply "Terrible" customer service and I doubt very much that you would want to publish mine, so I am lost for any answers from you, moreover, you have probably lost me as a customer whilst I go and try out a Panasonic version of the same thing.

Downwind
Hawaii, USA

Review by johnes - 6th February 2006
Rating: 0/10

Have had LVW-5045 for 6 months...

Agree with Ronk's and Downwind's negative reviews. The LVW-5045 suffers from a gross lack of human-factors engineering when it comes to functionality and its user interface. It takes a great deal of persistence, patience, and frustration-tollerance to operate this device which limits it useful target-audience to the technically savy who expect no more than bare-bones capabilities. In addition to the poor design of the remote, single channel capability, and other shortcomings noted, the unit:
1) can only copy in the originally recorded fomat,
2) had deficiencies in the original firmware and the organization of functions indicates a lack of proper problem factoring, programming, and quality assurance. The S.W. is a proprietary (not open source) OS (I did manage to find out that it was Digital River OS) and software. That is, there are no hackers providing mods to factory features and I predict eventual product abandonment (they've already removed a Lite-On discussion forum) w/o open-source community support when new products are developed by LiteOn.
3) allows "time-shift" recording of a program in progress but, unforturnately, time-shifted recordings are not captured as files for future editing, viewing, recording etc,
4) provides two similar but clumsy, confusing, and inadequate methods of file review and editing as if the deficiencies of the first prompted the development of a second somewhat different parallel method - instead of refactoring the basic problem when deficiencies in the first were detected.
5) has a firewire port, but this is only for camcorder input - the unit has no bus i/o for remote control from a PC or programming from a PC even if one comprehended the OS,

LiteOn would have benefitted from studying other user interfaces on the market, but instead went to market with what appears to be a first-cut problem factoring. It's a shame, because the internal hardware is sufficient to support a much more sophisticated, fluid, and intuitive set of functions.

As I've not had much experience with other DVD/HDD recorders, I won't assign a relative rating. However, I do have extensive experience with the design of user interfaces in general.