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.