"lsmartino" wrote in message
oups.com...

JR North ha escrito:
Well, for DVD recorder features to be "better" than a VCR, they should
be not only be common and standard across the range of recorder brands
and models, but intuitive as a VCR is for recording. My Sanyo DRW-500
does not do DVR-RAM. Any poor schmuck who bought one thinking they are
better than a VCR because it is "DVD" would be sorely disappointed at
the lack of aforementioned flexibility. MY Toshiba D-R4 does DVR-RAM,
but to perform as you suggest, requires not only complete familiarity
with the remote and ALL menu functions, but also laborious chaptering of
the offensive sections for deletion. Sure, you can do it, but it's not
intuitive, particularly easy, or, for that matter, doable by a large
majority of the consumer public who cannot even program the clock on
their VCR. How do you expect them to wade through the complicated menu
functions req to edit a DVD-RAM after the fact?
The video and audio quality on a DVD is "better", but that's the extent
of it.
JR



I agree that right now there is a lack of standardization, but in the
end there will be a standard. DVD Recorders have a long way to mature,
but the basic technollogy is very promising. VCR recorders also took
several years to mature as the final product we all knew. For my
personal tastes, I prefer a DVD recorder over any VCR... even after
having had in the past several models and VCR formats, including Beta.

Being at the 'sharp end' as it were, I'm not sure that I agree with this.
Firstly, it is a lot easier to model a product and its potential problems
these days, than it was back when VCRs came out. Even back then, the basic
technology was nothing like as unreliable as this stuff is, and at worst,
there was only three formats to contend with. All were perfectly good at
recording - and most would say that the one which ultimately won out as the
'standard', was not the best. VHS becoming the winner, was a direct result
of pressure from the American film studios over the format of playback-only
tapes for motion picture distribution. It had nothing to do with improving
or maturing the technology. In fact as it matured, its quality got worse,
being driven purely by minimising the cost, whilst just about managing to
come up to the VHS standard.

DVD recording technology, at least that used for domestic purposes, already
is pretty much mature. The standards war has nothing to do with this, as all
discs are the same physical size and shape (barring caddy-ised ones), so the
manufacturers can make any player, play any disc format pretty much. The
fact that each format has its own major manufacturer consortiums behind it,
but still, every manufacturer's product will play everyone elses (with a
couple of exceptions) should tell you all you need to know about how much
standards matter over sales with this particular technology.

The really interesting thing that I haven't yet figured is that the basic
technology *can* be totally reliable. For some years now, DVD recorders for
your computer have been available. You just buy one, stick it in a spare
bay, install the drivers, and that's pretty much it. You can then forget it.
However, many home DVD recorders for TV programmes employ exactly the same
IDE drives from the same manufacturers, but when they put them into their
products, suddenly, they die like flies. This implies that it is either
something to do with the software platform that they are running on, or the
power supply. I wonder if anyone else has a feeling on this, as it is
something which has puzzled me for a couple of years now.

Arfa