Review by dcam - 4th January 2005
Rating: 9/10

I believe this recorder is the same as a Tevion DVR-530S (as sold at ALDI).

You can see the specs here:
http://www.elliondigital.com/DVR-530S.htm

Records only on DVD+R/RW media. Records in DVD format with your choice of recording quality.

Playback zone can be set by powering the device up with no disk in the drive and pressing 77 followed by the zone you want or 0 for multizone, eg 770 for multizone.

It can play MP3 cds and MP3 DVDs. Some other players/recorders crash with MP3 DVDs with lots of files but this one seems to work fine.

It is supposed to be able to play divx movies but I haven't got any to try. It certainly did play my home movies from a joliet formatted disk with .mpg files on the disk.

It has a USB port, not for computer connections, but so that you can show pictures from your usb stick or camera. Specs say that it accepts usb sticks up to 128Mb but my 256Mb stick works fine too.

Has lots of inputs/outputs including composite and S-video, front and back. The specs include an "RF TV Output", but the manual says that it is merely a passthru for the RF TV input, so you can't connect this device directly to a TV that has no composite video or S-video input.

The device doesn't seem to have any problem recording the output of a PAL VCR that had the capacity to play NTSC tapes on a PAL TV and was playing an NTSC tape. It recognised the signal as contiaining fewer lines and recorded it as NTSC.

I've seen the device not recognise DVD+RW disks that have been quick-erased on a PC. It needs the full erase.

The device can erase DVD+RW disks, but only once you've recorded on them with the device.

Once you start recording a disk in a certain format, PAL or NTSC, all other recordings on that disk have to be that same format. That sounds reasonable anyway.

If you connect a DVD player to its input and watch a commercial disk through the player, it detected the fact that macrovision was present and the picture displayed was fine. If you have the on-screen display on, it displays the fact that macrovision was detected.

The device writes a DVD menu for each recording, and they work fine on the device, but taking them over to Intervideo WinDVD 4 on a PC, I've seen Intervideo WinDVD 4 play the first recording when you click the second recording, etc. Some funny business there. I've also seen the second recording played as appended to the first recording on WinDVD 4.

The device is slim and looks good but gets very hot especially during lengthy recording. The outside of the device can get hot enough to burn you during those times. The device seems to have inadequate cooling. Perhaps there's some USB fan device you can put on it so that when it is on, the fan is on.

It really needs a fan beside it to keep it cool during recording. I've used that a number of times and it stays at a sensible temperature with a fan next to it.

My rating selection is iffy because I don't know what to compare it against.

I'm happy with this device and it seems to do a good job. I hope the various problems I've seen will be ironed out in later firmware.