Philips DVDR-615 DVD Recorder/DVD Player

User Reviews for Philips DVDR-615 DVD Recorder/DVD Player

• Reviewed by: rc2773

  Duration of ownership:

  Strengths: Recording, picture quality

  Weaknesses: Remote, occasionally confusing menus

  Overall Evaluation: The Philips DVDR615 DVD Recorder/CD Player/DVD Player is a good machine with the normal drawbacks. It is not great by any means, but it will satisfy your basic needs and a little bit more. SETUP: Setup is easy-if you know what you?re doing. It will be harder for those inexperienced with setting up home entertainment devices. It is a bit complicated to figure out which cable goes with which port, but if you are upgrading from a VCR you can compare ports. After a long tedious moment of frustration, you will eventually yell ?Eureka!? and you will complete setup. After you hook up the recorder to the TV and the wall, you will need to scan for channels and change the clock settings. Note that if you get no channels the first time, you can reset up and try it again. There is a small counter under the scan channels option, showing you the number of channels it has found. In case you were wondering, DVD recorders need to scan for channels for the following reason: you will only be able to record on channels that the DVD recorder recognizes. STARTING TO PLAY DVD MOVIES OR TELEVISION SHOWS, OR ANY OTHER NON-SELF-RECORDED DISCS: To play non-self-recorded disks, follow these easy-to-understand steps: Go to the recorder and hit the up arrow button to open the disc tray. (You can also open the tray by holding down the stop button on your remote. This feature is a bit annoying; there should be a separate eject button, but alas, none of the sort.) Place the disc in the tray, and press the up arrow or hold down the stop button again to close the tray. A small bar will come up at the top of the TV screen, with a clock, and the word ?READING?. When it is done, a message may come up: ?Do you want to access the disc?s contents??. Press the up button on you remote until you get to ?YES? and press OK. An extremely bizarre menu will come up. PLEASE IGNORE THE MENU. It goes on about titles and all this ridiculous stuff even I can?t discern. Please, press ?DISC? on your remote. The menu provided by the makers of the disc will appear. Use the arrow keys and the OK or PLAY button on your remote to navigate the menu. When you are done with a particular feature and want to go back to the main menu, annoyingly, you have to press ?DISC? again. Press ?STOP? only if you want to end your time with the ?DISC?. When you want to retrieve the disc from the tray, hold down the ?STOP? button on your remote. TIPS FOR FAST FORWARDING, REWINDING, SLOW-MO, PAUSE AND CHAPTER NAVIGATING: This is one of the worst things about the recorder. Fast-forwarding and rewinding is one of the toughest things to do on this player. To fast-forward, you have to hold down the double right-pointing arrow key, also known as the ?NEXT CHAPTER? button. If you want to just fast-forward a few minutes, DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES PRESS THAT BUTTON AND IMMEDIATELY LET GO. HOLD IT DOWN! When you see the bar on the top of the screen, telling you that the feature you are watching is moving at 4X its normal speed. If you decide that 4X is too slow, HOLD DOWN the ?NEXT CHAPTER? button again until you see 8X. There is also a 32X, but it is easier to press and remove to the next chapter, than 32X. Press and remove the ?NEXT CHAPTER? button to move to the next chapter. Similarly to the ?STOP-EJECT? issue, it would be a lot easier if ?NEXT CHAPTER? and the nonexistent ?FAST-FORWARD? button were separate. To rewind, repeat the above, except use the ?PREVIOUS CHAPTER? button instead. To pause, push the parallel-lines button, otherwise known as the ?PAUSE? button. To resume normal play, press, the large right-pointing arrow button, also called ?PLAY?. To move in slow-motion, hold down the ?NEXT CHAPTER? button, and to rewind in slow-motion, hold down the ?PREVIOUS CHAPTER? button. Once again, the buttons should be separate. Confused yet? RECORDING: You can record on DVD+R and DVD+RW discs. Recording is one of the EASIEST things to do on this recorder. Well, it should be, it is a DVD Recorder. To record, simply: Place a DVD+R or DVD+RW (the only difference is that on a DVD+RW you can record over other recordings and on a DVD+R disc you can only delete recordings without recording over them) disc in the tray. Press record on the player to immediately begin recording on the channel you are on. To stop recording, press stop. To do manual recording, press the ?TIMER? button on your remote. Then press the green button. Set the times using the arrow keys. It?s SO easy. Then set the channel. If you, for example, record something on Monday from 8:00-8:30 and you want to do it again next week, press ?REPEAT TWICE? on the screen. Finally, to have room for 2 hours of recording, press M2. For 2.5 hours, scroll down to M2X, for 3 do M3 and so on. Quality is better with less hours of recording.
• Reviewed by: ivkay

  Duration of ownership:

  Strengths: cheap price

  Weaknesses: difficult to set up

  Overall Evaluation: The price is really good after rebate for a DVD recorder. Howevever, it is extremely diffilcult to use remote to set up recording. If you just need it to replace VCR, it might be okay, but for further application, you would be dissapointed.