DVD recorders and hard-disk video recorders are taking the place of VCRs in an increasing number of homes. Both types of digital recorders offer plenty of advantages over VHS recording, but what's it like to use these newer technologies? Barry Montgomery tried out Pioneer's DVR-510H DVD recorder/hard drive combo, and has the details.

I'm going to begin this review with a confession: I'm not a videophile. And, in terms of video technology, I'm a bit behind the times. Until now, the only home video recording I'd ever done was accomplished with my once-fashionable but now sadly outdated VCR. The opportunity to review the Pioneer DVR-510H, however, gave me a great opportunity to catch up on several of the recent advances in video recording that I've been missing out on.

Offering the superior video quality and convenience of digital technology, both hard disk video recorders and DVD recorders offer a wealth of advantages over the VCR. But each one has its limitations as well — hard drives offer no permanent storage for archiving your "keeper" recordings, while DVD recorders limit your recording options to the few hours of video that a single disc can hold. The innovative DVR-510H overcomes these drawbacks by combining an 80GB hard drive and a DVD burner in one unit. The result is a digital video recorder with remarkable power and flexibility.

The DVR-510H's slim chassis packs a wealth of digital video recording, viewing, and editing possibilities!

Incredible recording convenience
After hooking the DVR-510H up to my A/V system, I played around with it for half an hour before even looking at the manual. I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to record TV programs. Especially when recording to the hard drive, absolutely no preparation is required — there are no tapes or discs to load, and there?s no scrambling to find a "blank spot" that hasn't been recorded on yet. Simply press ?Record? and the hard drive immediately begins capturing whatever channel you're watching. It never records over other saved programs, and it keeps careful track of everything you've recorded. Video recording has never been so easy, or so glitch-free!

It turned out that recording to a DVD-R or DVD-RW disc was very nearly as easy. Of course, you have to have a recordable disc loaded in the DVD well, but other than that, you get almost exactly the same hassle-free, one-touch recording convenience as you do with hard disk recording. The '510H automatically knows where to begin recording on the disc, and with a press of the "Display" button on the remote, you can quickly find out how much recording time is left on the disc.

The '510H also offers timer recording capabilities similar to those on a good VCR — but of course when you?re recording to an 80GB hard drive, you've got far more storage space than a VHS tape could ever afford. Recording times can be set with an on-screen interface that is self-explanatory and simple to use. An even easier method is to simply punch in the TV Plus+ codes found in many TV listings. You can set the timer to record either to the hard drive or a recordable DVD. A cool feature: if you've programmed a DVD timer recording and there isn't enough room left on the disc you've got loaded, the ?510H will automatically record the program onto its hard drive instead.

The '510H's on-screen menus refer to the basic unit of recording a "title." How much material is included within an individual title is up to you — the length can vary anywhere from one second up to six hours. Titles can also be subdivided into "chapters" for editing purposes (more on this later).


High-speed copying
One of the '510H's fairly unique features is its ability to record material from the hard drive to DVDs at speeds much greater than real time. And because the copying is an entirely digital process, there?s no loss of quality even when dubbing DVDs at the highest speeds. The time it takes to record a given set of titles in high-speed mode depends on the quality at which they were recorded and the type of recordable disc being used. See the chart below for some example copy times.


The high-speed copying feature is undoubtedly most useful for folks who are producing many copies of a single DVD — for example, making a compilation of home movies to send to a variety of friends and family members. But even for single copies, I found it to be a real time-saver and a very handy feature.

Chase Play
This cool feature lets you watch a recording currently in progress from the beginning. For example, if you?ve set the ?510H to record a football game and you get home 90 minutes into the game, Chase Play lets you watch the game from the start while the recording continues, so you don?t miss a second. Another Chase Play option is to watch a different, previously recorded title while recording a new title to either the hard drive or a DVD-RW disc. (Note that if your'e recording to a DVD-RW, you must use a disc capable of 2X recording for either Chase Play feature to work.)

Video fans accustomed to the advanced functionality of a TiVo or Replay hard disk video recorder should take note: Chase Play simply begins play from the beginning of the title currently being recorded. You can scan forward or backward within the material already recorded, but you don?t have the option to "pause" live TV or create an instant replay in the same easy way that TiVo and Replay recorders allow.

Camcorder-friendly recording
The '510H's front panel not only features audio/video jacks for quick hookup of a standard camcorder, but also an i.LINK input/output for advanced connectivity with compatible digital camcorders. For this review, I hooked up a Canon ZR-65MC camcorder to the '510H using the i.LINK jack. Once this connection was made, I was able to control the playback of the camera via the ?510H?s remote — at least until I started recording material onto the hard drive, at which point the remote reverted to controlling the ?510H.

The i.LINK input/output is a big plus for folks with newer digital camcorders, but even owners of older camcorders will love the flexibility that the '510H offers for organizing, editing, and archiving home movies. Once you've recorded your camcorder-captured memories to the hard drive, they're available for playback with the press of a few buttons and editable in countless different ways (editing options are discussed on page 4). Best of all, you can assemble customized sequences of scenes from your home movies, and then burn these to recordable DVDs to share with distant friends and family members.

One-touch copy and disc backup
The '510H also offers some very simple, user-friendly options for copying material to and from DVDs. A one-touch copy button at the very top of the remote control is one of the simplest of these. When you?re watching a title recorded on the hard drive, pressing this button will automatically record the entire title to DVD at the fastest possible speed. When watching a DVD, the one-touch copy button works similarly, but copies the title you're watching on DVD to the hard drive. (Note that almost all commercial DVDs feature copyright protection; copying from DVD to the hard drive is generally only possible from DVD-Rs and DVD-RWs.)

Even the ultra-simple one-touch copy and disc backup functions take advantage of the '510H's high-speed copying abilities.

For making an exact copy of a DVD-R or DVD-RW, the Disc Backup feature makes the process as straightforward and painless as possible. Basically, all you have to do is load the source disc and then the blank disc when prompted, and the '510H takes care of everything else, employing the fastest possible recording speed.


Recording quality and storage space
The DVR-510H offers a huge variety of recording quality modes. As you move from lower to higher quality modes, you?ll enjoy an increasingly better picture, but the recording will also take up more space (either on the hard drive or on a recordable DVD). The ?510H?s four basic modes are the same as those found on almost all hard disk or DVD recorders — Fine, SP (Standard Play), LP (Long Play), and EP (Extended Play). For an idea of how much video you?ll be able to record to the hard drive or a blank DVD at each of these modes, see the chart below.


The material I recorded while testing out the DVR-510H came from over-the-air TV broadcasts, VHS tapes, and a digital camcorder. In all cases, there was very little to no visible difference between material recorded at the Fine and the SP settings. There was a modest drop-off in quality when going from SP to LP mode — mainly in the realm of color accuracy — but I found that LP recordings were still quite watchable. The biggest difference by far was between the LP and EP settings. My EP recordings had a very visible softening of the picture and much more pixelization than was apparent at LP quality.

I also noticed that with a less-than-perfect video source (such as TV programs marred by staic, or VHS tapes recorded using a VCR's lower recording quality modes), the '510H's digitization of the picture tended to magnify some of the errors already present in the picture, so that the resulting recording actually looked significantly worse than the original source. This effect was by far the most notable on EP recordings, but even LP recordings sometimes demonstrated this tendency.

When using the Fine setting, audio is encoded in stereo in the uncompressed PCM format. For all other settings, the audio is recorded as Dolby Digital 2.0 (essentially a compressed stereo soundtrack). The ?510H cannot record multichannel soundtracks at all.

Manual Recording modes
The ?510H offers a lot more variety than most digital video recorders when it comes to recording quality, thanks to its Manual Recording option. This lets you select from a menu of 32 recording quality settings — the highest quality setting is equivalent to the Fine setting, while the lowest is equivalent to the EP setting. So Manual Recording gives you the choice of 30 stairstep gradations between the highest and lowest quality settings.

The advantage? While you're recording to DVD, you can achieve the best recording quality possible with any given length of program. For example, if you've got a three-hour movie that you need to record on a single DVD, most DVD recorders would force you to use the LP setting, which lets you put 4 hours of video onto one disc. However, you?d essentially be wasting a quarter of the blank disc?s capacity. With Manual recording, you can select a setting midway between SP and LP speeds that will give you exactly three hours of recording time on a standard recordable DVD. That way, you?ll utilize your recordable DVD's full storage capability, and enjoy a higher level of video fidelity than you'd get from an LP recording.

To make Manual Recording even more user-friendly, Pioneer has included a feature called Optimum Recording. When you've got material ready to record to DVD-R or DVD-RW, you can switch Optimum Recording on, and the '510H does the math for you. It automatically selects the highest Manual Recording quality that will allow your program(s) to be recorded onto the remaining space on the recordable DVD you?ve got loaded. This handy feature works with both material you're recording from the hard drive to DVD and timer recordings going straight to DVD.

Playback is a snap, too
Thanks to the DVR-510H's Disc Navigator feature, playback is painless — no more endless rewinding and fast forwarding tapes to try to find the beginning of the program you want to watch! Disc Navigator, which is accessible with the press of a single button on the remote, presents a menu of thumbnail images, one for each recorded title. (You can call up this menu for either the hard drive or for any recordable DVD you've got loaded.) Six titles are displayed on the screen at once — additional titles appear on subsequent "pages" that you can access with the remote's navigational keys. Once you've highlighted the material you want to watch, pressing the "Enter" key begins playback.

The Disc Navigator menu makes it a cinch to find the recording you want to watch.

The thumbnail image for a title is based on the first split-second of its video content, but I often found that this was not a meaningful indicator of the contents. However, you can set any image within the title to serve as its thumbnail quite easily. (You can also enter a name for each title, but I found the interface for this cumbersome, as you use the remote's cursor buttons and the Enter key to select one letter at a time from an on-screen alphabet.)

Fortunately, the Disc Navigator makes identifying the content of titles pretty easy without any special effort on your part. When you highlight a specific thumbnail, after about a second its video begins to play (remaining at thumbnail size within the menu screen), complete with audio. This feature is especially handy for TV shows that you record with the intention of watching once and then deleting, where it's not worth taking the time to locate a representative thumbnail or enter a name.


Editing video content
The ?510H offers a wealth of editing options for any video content that you've got stored on its hard drive. There are two basic editing modes — Original Content and Copy List. Original Content editing alters the hard drive recordings permanently. Copy List editing, on the other hand, lets you essentially create edited versions of hard drive titles that you can record to DVD, without changing the content of the titles on the hard drive. Say, for example, that you've transferred three hours of camcorder movies of your kids to your hard drive and you want to send a DVD of the highlights to their grandparents. Copy List editing lets you hand-pick which scenes you want to burn to DVD and which scenes to leave off, while leaving the original hard drive recording untouched. Later, if you want to create a more complete DVD version of these home movies for yourself, you can easily archive the entire set of movies on DVD, or re-edit a new version using a new Copy List.

Copy List editing gives you incredible flexibility in customizing the DVDs you burn. The edits you make only effect the contents of the DVD, leaving the original recordings on the hard drive untouched.

The ?510H also lets you edit material recorded on a DVD-RW disc in essentially the same ways described above. Original Content editing actually alters content of the titles on the DVD-RW. Play List editing alters the way the contents of the DVD play back without actually changing the titles themselves. Of course, you can go back and change a DVD-RW's Play List any time you want, so this option gives you rather amazing flexibility with archived material. Unfortunately, use of this Play List is only available if you burn the DVD-RW using a recording mode known as VR, and most DVD players cannot play such discs. (Of course, you?ll always be able to play VR discs on the '510H itself.)

Titles, chapters, and fine editing
Many of the ?510H?s editing capabilities revolve around the division of a title into a series of chapters. The division points that mark the beginnings and ends of chapters must be inserted by the user, which can be done during or after recording. Once a title is broken up into chapters, individual chapters can be deleted, or the running order of chapters can be rearranged as you see fit.

While the editing capabilities of the '510H would seem to offer almost limitless flexibility, I found that it wasn't really well-designed for large amounts of fine editing. When attempting to compile a video montage from several dozen short video clips, I found the '510H's editing interface both awkward to use and imprecise in making cuts. The video editing software commonly available on PCs far surpasses the ?510H in terms of precision editing and manipulating large numbers of short video clips. However, this isn't really a flaw in the '510H — it's simply not designed for this kind of work. There was one area, however, where more flexible editing capabilities would've offered a real practical advantage — editing out commercials.

The Chaper Edit menu represents each chapter of a recorded title with a separate thumbnail. You can rerrange the running order of chapters, delete chapters, and combine or divide chapters as you please — the options are almost unlimited!

Removing commercials
Unfortunately, the only way to delete commercials from a recorded program is to break each block of commercials into its own separate chapter, and then delete those chapters one at a time. If you wait to do the chapter breakout until after the recording, the process of removing commercials involves several different editing modes and quite a bit of your time. In general, the '510H's editing features are designed to make it very difficult to delete material accidentally. While this is probably a good thing on the whole, it can make editing out frequent commercial breaks a pain.

For shows that you've recorded to the hard drive with the intention of watching once or twice and then deleting, there?s no reason to bother with editing out commercials (unless the hard drive is very close to being full). The '510H offers several high-speed scan modes and a commercial skip button that jumps forward one minute in the title every time you press it.

However, if you're present during the recording of a program that you plan to archive on DVD in commercial-free form, I highly recommend setting chapter marks at the beginning and end of each commercial break (this painless process requires only one button-press on the remote). If you do this, it's actually pretty simple to go in later and delete the chapters that contain only commercials. Another option for editing out commercials is to use the remote's Pause button to halt recording during commercial breaks, which eliminates the need for any editing after the recording is made. However, unless you?re focused intently on the show, it can be easy to occasionally miss the return from a commercial and thus omit a portion of the program from your recording.

Putting it all together
After spending about 25 hours recording and editing video with the DVR-510H, I found that its pairing of a massive hard drive and a DVD burner not only gives you the best of both digital recording technologies, but also offers some fantastic synergies between the two. The hard drive gives you remarkable convenience and flexibility in recording from TV, with enough storage for dozens of programs and fast, easy access to everything you've recorded — even while a new recording is in progress! The easy-to-navigate menus make it a breeze to either play back a show once or twice and then delete it, or if it's a favorite, archive it to DVD. You also get a great way to compile camcorder movies or old VHS recordings, edit that material in any way you like, and then burn your customized videos to DVD. In short, the DVR-510H offers a truly comprehensive video recording solution. I'll never look at my old VCR the same way again.