Lite-On LVW-5005 DVD Recorder

Great value, great flexibility, great performance

By Yahoo! Shopping User  Mar 25, 2004 | 110 out of 115 found this Lite-On LVW-5005 review helpful

Pros: Flexibility, recording on all media, quality of recordings, price

Cons: Motor drive just a little noisy.

I received the LiteOn 5005 All-Write DVD recorder today, after waiting nearly two months for them to become available. I started shopping for a DVD recorder just after Christmas, and fortunately found advanced information about this recorder just be...fore I bought another, much more limited product.What is great about this is it records on all formats: DVD+R,+RW,-R,-RW and it records VCD, SVCD, or Audio on CD-Rs or CD-RWs. It is unbelieveably flexible. On DVD it can record in four qualities, 1 hour, 2, 4, or 6 hours. I haven't tried the 6 hour format yet, but the 2 hour format produces very high quality, indistinguishable from the original source, as viewed on my 65-inch Toshiba HDTV Ultravision. I popped in a CD-RW disk and recorded 36 minutes of video from my PVR. I was very surprised by the quality of the playback. It is MUCH better than I expected, significantly better than VHS quality, and very useable for those half-hour TV programs you just want to save to watch at a more convenient time.I wanted to see how well it handled DVDs recorded on a computer, so I tried a couple I had burned earlier, and it worked great with no problem. I also tried SVCD disks I made about a year ago, again with no playback problems. I tried a CD-RW disk that had .MP3 files on it. No problem. I also tried a disk that had a bunch of digital photos in .JPG format. This is repetitions, but again..no problem.The menus are easy to use. It's easy to format disks, set up timer records, and perform other setup task. Setup is a breeze. From the time the UPS man delivered it to my first DVD recording was less than 10 minutes.Overall this is a great product. The price is also very reasonable, cheaper than many DVD recorders out there that can burn only one format. I can't imagine why anyone would buy another product now that this one is available. My only criticism is that the unit is a little noisy. The motor that drives the discs seems about twice as noisy as other DVD players I've had. It's not loud enough to be objectionable, just loud enough to make me worry just a bit if I might not have problems with the drive in the future. I guess only time will tell, but for the moment this unit is better than I expected and certainly worth the price. Read more Less