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Ever wondered what to do with that old VHS collection?
Perhaps, you may want to record a show to watch later. The Sony DVD direct lets
you do just that. It records directly from TV and connects to your computer as
well to give you full control over the recording. It has a tiny LCD screen
upfront and buttons for Record, Pause (to pause recording from the TV to avoid
ads) and Stop. It has six other buttons that control various functions like
Input Select and Recording Quality.
If you connect it to your PC using the USB 2.0 port (cable
supplied), it works like a regular external DVD drive and the LCD reads
'Computer Mode'. Connecting it to the TV using either the Composite input,
S-Video or DV port makes it work like a recorder. For this, insert a blank disc
and hit Record! You can record in any of the three recording modes: HQ (1 hour),
SP (2 hours) and SLP (6 hours) in decreasing order of quality.The recording
quality is obviously dependant on the input signal, but we got a faithful
reproduction of the image as we saw it on TV. It supports almost all media
formats including the Dual Layer +R format. It gives the best speeds you can get
on this writer. It writes DVD +/- R at 16X, and +/-RW at 8X and 6X respectively.
If you use a DVD+R DL, it records that at 4X and allows you to store 8.5 GB data
on a single disc! It took us around 10 mins to write 3.5 GB of data to the DL
disc, and a mere 6 mins to write 4.5 GB of data to our DVD-R. Though this drive
supports 4X DL writing, the media that's currently available is just for 2.4X
speeds, so the drive could potentially go faster!
Sadly, it doesn't display what it records.
Bottom Line: Apart from the inability to display
what it records, we recommend it for recording TV programs, converting old
tapes, or writing DVDs at fast speeds.
Varun Dubey