When I purchased this DVD recorder about a year and a half ago, I was very skeptical about how well it would perform. I have had problems with previous RCA products, however, the price on this unit was just too good to be true. Boy have I been glad I purchased it. This recorder has far exceeded my expectations. It has almost no delay when you hit the record button. It accepts many different DVD disk formats. Hard drive recording and program transfers from the hard drive to a DVD disk have been flawless. It takes a while to learn to use the unit. It is a little complicated but the effort will be worth it. The Remote is well designed and works very well. There are several record quality settings which can allow a lot recording on a DVD disk with just a little loss in picture quality in the higher compression modes. At any rate, I would highly recommend this recorder to anyone if you can find it. Mine has been a real winner. It is still performing flawless and I have recorded hundreds of... Read more

I've had this unit about a year and a half and it has filled my simple needs quite well - recording films not now or ever likely to be on DVD to the hard disk via timers - since the films I want to see often come on in the dead of night or while I'm at work - and copying those films to DVD if I decide they are good enough to keep. You can even edit out commercials if necessary via the "Hide Chapter" option. I have noted a few problems, but these may be present on other DVRs:
1. Anything running longer than about 80 minutes or so records in "real time".
2. If you are around the border of that time - 80 minutes - the recorder will get confused and chop the film off before it is finished recording. Solution: leave some buffer at the end if you are around that limit.
3. DVD-Rs often have artifacts in them. I did not have this problem when I graduated to DVD+Rs as recording media.
4. One day I decided to record a big block of films in one 10 hour block. When I came... Read more

I have owned this DVR for 14 months. It works okay most of the time. Sometimes it does odd things and has to be unplugged to reset it. My biggest fault with it is that it doesn't give you standard information about a DVD like how long it is and how much time is remaining. All it tells you is how long it has been playing. In spite of this I was basically happy with it until the DVD door stopped opening. Of course this happened right after the warranty expired. So now I can no longer record to DVD's. If you buy one I suggest also buying the extended warranty.

This is an update on my previous comments. Since the DVR was out of warranty, I figured I didn't have anything to loose by taking it apart and trying to see what was keeping the disc door from opening. When I opened it the door opened and I was able to remove the disc. I reinserted it and it hung up again. I tried another disc and it worked fine. It seems that there was an error when the burner wrote to the disc and it... Read more