It’s remarkable how far technology can come in less than a decade. When DVD recorders were first introduced to the market around the turn of the century, they cost several thousand dollars, yet had less than half the functionality of current generation DVD recorders. DVD recorders were, for a long time, exclusively the property of the wealthy and hardcore technophiles. Now, you can find standard DVD recorders for $100 or less, and they are becoming more and more commonplace in homes around the world.
Now that DVD recorders are easily affordable for most people, VHS recorders are finally starting to be completely phased out. Before, it was the VCR’s ability to record people’s favorite shows and view home movies that had kept that obsolete format alive. Now that people can experience all of the advantages of DVD when recording their favorite TV shows or movies, the video cassette recorder will continue to fade into the past.
The advantages of DVD recording over VHS recording are many. They include:
* Superior picture and sound quality
* More durable, easier to use storage media
* Quick access to different chapters of the video, without the need for rewinding or fast forwarding
* Potential to include subtitles or labels on videos
* Little risk of wear due to repeated playing of a disc
* Removes the risk of accidentally overwriting old, important media
In addition to paying attention to these features, anyone in the market for a DVD recorder should also pay attention to the unit’s DVD authoring capabilities and features. While most DVD recorders allow the user to make simple menus and sort out chapters with the included DVD authoring software, the quality of this software varies from product to product. If you just want to record favorite shows onto DVD and don’t really care about presentation, then you should just aim for the cheapest DVD recorder you can find. However, if you want to have good looking menus and other features, look for units with better software built-in.
The original models of standard DVD recorders could only record media to DVD-Rs or DVD-RAM formats. Since then, advances have been made that allow DVD recorders to record to all the different forms of DVD media, such as DVD-RW and DVD+R DL. DVR-RWs have the ability to have data rewritten on them multiple times, while DVD+R DL, known as “dual layer” discs, have nearly twice the storage capacity of standard DVD.
