CUSTOM INSTALLATION HOW-TO

RCA A commercial success

The Short Form

$300 / 17 x 2.5 x 11 IN / rca.com / 317-587-3000

Plus

•Automatic commercial removal. •Good progressive-scan performance. •HDMI output.

Minus

•No playlist editing.

Key Features

•Automatically skips commercials •Records on DVD+R/RW discs •HDMI output upconverts to 720p or 1080i HDTV formats

Test Bench

DVD recordings on the DRC8060N were average, including those made using its 4-hour LP and 6-hour EP modes. Like the Samsung, the RCA also has an 8-hour mode that didn't look good even on the stills of a Ken Burns documentary. Progressive-scan performance - especially from movie discs - was unusually good on both the HDMI and component-video outputs. Click here for full lab results

From the outside, RCA's DRC8060N looks like a typical DVD recorder. It has all the usual features, and there are some thoughtful twists, such as being able to randomize the playback order of the images on a JPEG picture disc. But the DRC8060 also has a couple of very unexpected features. First, there's an HDMI output for feeding digital video and audio to compatible TVs and A/V receivers. It can be switched to either the 720p or 1080i HDTV format, though as I've said before in writing about upconverting DVD players, resolution isn't actually improved beyond standard DVD performance. Depending on your TV, however, the picture may benefit from the direct digital connection, and the HDMI link can simplify hookup in many systems that feature a compatible TV.

REMOVING COMMERCIALS But I'm more excited about another unusual feature in the DRC8060N - its Commercial Advance feature, which automatically detects and hides commercials while you're recording! This is a very slick update of a feature that was once available on some VCRs and ReplayTV DVRs.

For the most part, TV commercials are set off from the main program when both the sound and the picture rapidly fade to black (or silence) and remain muted for a moment - right before and just after the commercial segment. Commercial Advance automatically inserts chapter markers in these gaps and designates the resulting "chapters" as "hidden" so the commercials are skipped over during playback of your recorded DVD. Pretty clever.

The manual says Commercial Advance can be fooled if the broadcast doesn't conform to this fade-out/in behavior. I recorded a solid hour of Anderson Cooper 360º on CNN, and while the system retained the CNN promos seamlessly tacked onto the newscast, it effectively nixed 16 minutes of commercials. Most important, it didn't screw up the program.

Should you decide you want to watch some of the commercials - Super Bowl fans take note - you can always "unhide" them via the manual-editing menu. Even then, you can still skip over them manually using the remote's chapter-advance button. And if the system makes a mistake in marking commercial segments, you can remove the bogus markers and insert your own - even hide the entire Super Bowl and keep just the commercials!

The upshot, however, is that this is all you get - the RCA's editing capabilities are limited to defining chapter segments and then hiding or unhiding them. That's it. As usual with DVD+R/RW-only decks, there's no playlist editing to allow you to reorder program segments, as you might want to do with camcorder footage. Still, the combination of Commercial Advance and manual chapter editing is all that most users will ever need.

VIDEO PERFORMANCE DVD recordings on the DRC8060N were typical of today's DVD recorders, with excellent quality in the 2-hour mode and increasingly poorer performance in the higher-capacity modes (beware of any recorder's 8-hour mode). But its progressive-scan outputs (both HDMI and component video) were surprisingly clean, with far fewer jaggies than usual when playing video-originated material. In this regard, the RCA was much better than the average standalone DVD player.

BOTTOM LINE Add its unusually good progressive-scan performance to the extremely useful commercial-skip feature, and the RCA DRC8060N is a welcome addition to the ranks of basic DVD recorders and one we can highly recommend.