Pioneer DVR640HS DVD Recorder (DVR, 160GB Hard Drive)

Reviewed by: kwkkwk

Duration of ownership:

Strengths: video quality, capacity, DVD compatability, ease of use

Weaknesses: VCRplus is a bit tedious to set up

Overall Evaluation: I had been eying HDD/dvd recorders for a while. I built a multimedia pc for the living room that I use for these functions, but it's a little complicated and uses several different softwares to record, edit, and write DVD's. (My wife won't use it.) The 640, on the other hand, is near perfect. The only thing missing that would make it perfect is tight integration with my cable company (this capability doesn't actually exist). I have the cable company DVR and the dual tuner, series manager, and scheduling are just too convenient. However, it fills up and you have to delete things. With the 640 you have much more space to begin with and you can write video to DVD's. The DVD's I've produced have played perfectly in my PC, a couple of set top DVD players, and XBOX 360. OK, I confess. I love this device. I've been using it for about 3 weeks. It's very easy to record from the built in tuner and also from my cable company box or other sources. Then it's very easy to edit out commercials, title, and thumbnail. Then you can leave it on the hard drive or do a high speed copy to DVD, or both. A full movie took about 13 minutes to write to DVD from the hard drive. The default quality setting (SP) produces very good video quality. This gives you about 2 hours on a standard writeable DVD (both + and - type media). It will also write dual layer media for somewhat less than double that capacity, but I haven't tried that yet.My only minor gripe is that the VCRplus is a bit tedious to set up. You basically have to go thru every channel in the VCRplus list and enter the corresponding channel for your system. So, if VCRplus shows SciFi channel as 87, you look up SciFi on your system and find that it is channel 67, then you go to the VCRplus setup and enter this info. Then repeat the process for 100 channels or so. AND, don't make any mistakes or scheduled recording may not work correctly. All the channel entries are initially blank so VCRplus won't completely work until you enter the channels. (You could use the VCRplus codes and then manually enter the correct channel number when you set up the recording. VCRplus will still set the recording time parameters and ask for the correct channel.)Perfection remains elusive but this unit is fantastic! It's functional, compatable, easy, and produces great results. Highly recommended.