OTHER TECH

Picture Quality We've seen a couple of generations of DVD recorders by now, and our tests have shown that things have pretty much evened out on the picture-quality front. In other words, the recorded image quality you get is not so much a question of which format or brand of recorder you use but of which recording "mode" you select. Every DVD recorder has multiple recording modes that offer a tradeoff between recording time and picture quality - they're equivalent to a VCR's tape speeds. But with DVD recorders, the difference in video quality between the "best" mode (which gives 1 hour per disc) and the "worst" mode (6 or 8 hours, depending on the model) is greater than between the SP and EP speeds on a VCR.

In testing a number of DVD recorders over the past year or so, we've learned that the 1-hour mode delivers picture quality about equal to that of a DVD movie. Many decks also deliver close to the same level of performance in their 2-hour recording modes. It's when you go beyond 2 hours, however, that the degradation in picture quality starts to become more noticeable, usually in two stages.

First, horizontal resolution is cut in half because the recorder captures only every other horizontal pixel. At the same time, various MPEG encoding "artifacts" - like blocking and "mosquito noise" - start to become noticeable, especially around the edges of objects. The picture looks less sharp and rougher or grittier.

When you get to the modes offering recording times of 6 or more hours, the recorder encodes only every other vertical pixel, cutting vertical resolution in half as well. By this time, with both horizontal and vertical detail significantly reduced and the encoder artifacts going full-tilt, the picture looks pretty sorry. To my eyes, it's actually worse than at a VCR's EP speed - the digital artifacts are more intrusive than the snowy (noisy), color-smeared look of slow-speed tape. Typically, the image breaks up into square blocks, the edges of objects appear rough, and, on some machines, movement looks jerky.

Matching the Recorder to the Job As mentioned earlier, the key to choosing the right DVD recorder lies in what you plan on doing with the deck when you get it home. Are you a big time-shifter who can't stand missing an episode of CSI? Or are you a camcorder nut who likes to edit home movies and send them around to your friends and relatives? Or maybe you just want to archive treasured video footage for your personal library. Whatever the case, the mission is to find a deck that offers the right set of recording and editing features - whether these are capabilities of the disc format itself or specific to the particular model you buy.

If you're going to use a DVD recorder like many people use their VCRs - to record TV broadcasts for later viewing - look for programming features like VCR Plus+ and newer onscreen program guides like Guide Plus+. Models that include an infrared (IR) "blaster," which enables the recorder to send channel-change codes to a cable-TV box, will make it easy to record multiple programs on different channels.

If you want to extensively edit your camcorder footage, pay close attention to the editing capabilities of the decks you're considering - and how you'd use them. While any DVD recorder will be able to get rid of the commercials from those CSI episodes (especially when using rewritable discs), editing that 2-hour recording of Uncle Joe's birthday party down to a nice, tight 20, 15, or, better, 10 minutes requires more sophisticated editing tools.

While you'd find it difficult to produce a truly movielike program using any standalone DVD recorder, the decks best suited for editing camcorder footage allow you to easily trim, excerpt, and reorder your shots. Disc format is not nearly as important here as simplicity of the editing system.

If your footage is primarily from analog tapes (VHS, 8mm, even Beta), a few decks are equipped with video processing designed to clean up an analog signal before recording it on DVD. On the other hand, if you have a digital (MiniDV or Digital 8) camcorder, you'll definitely want a DVD recorder that has an i.Link (a.k.a. FireWire or IEEE 1394) input, which is the only way to get your footage onto disc without a quality-degrading cycle of digital-to-analog-to-digital signal conversion.

A couple of DVD recorders also have i.Link outputs, which can be a godsend if you want to feed camcorder footage into your computer for further processing. (Unfortunately, most of the i.Link inputs on DVD recorders won't accept video from a computer.) As far as DVD dubbing goes, don't get any big ideas: Except for some test discs and instructional or adult titles, all commercial DVDs are copy-protected, and DVD recorders will not record copy-protected signals regardless of input, nor will they feed them to their i.Link outputs.

If video editing ranks high on your list of DVD-recorder priorities, you'll also want to take a close look at the growing number of models that include built-in hard-disk drives, ranging from 40 to 120 gigabytes (GB) in capacity. Usually the hard drive is there to provide TiVo-like simultaneous record/playback functions, which will be of great interest to hard-core time-shifters, although any DVD-RAM recorder can do the same without a hard drive. But beyond providing an easy way to record favorite TV shows, a hard-disk drive can be used to edit video footage before you burn a DVD - without a computer. There are several advantages to this:

• Editing is substantially faster because hard-disk cueing is much quicker than DVD cueing.

• You can use inexpensive write-once DVD-R or DVD+R discs for your final copies.

• It's easy to make multiple copies of edited productions because your editing commands are stored on the hard drive. Otherwise, you'd have to edit each copy separately or else dub a homemade DVD played on an external player, which involves a loss in video quality. (The exception is Sony's RDR-GX7 used with a digital camcorder, which can make multiple copies of an edited production on write-once discs without the help of a hard drive.)

Obviously, it's impossible for us to cover all available features, let alone the subtleties of operation that distinguish one model from another, in the space we have here. That's why we recommend checking out the owner's manuals of models that interest you (they can be downloaded from most manufacturers' Web sites). Short of bringing the recorder home and playing with it, this is probably the easiest way to make sure a model has the capabilities you want. Even playing with a recorder will eventually require you to read the manual - their flexibility means that they can sometimes also be difficult to use.

Now it's time to check out the product listings on the next page to see which models catch your eye. There's enough variety to satisfy just about everyone - even a die-hard technophile like me. And the choices will only grow in the years to come as DVD recorders finally replace the decidedly obsolescent VHS recorder.