Bargain Price

Author's Rating:

Pros: Lowest price for dvd recorder with hd

Cons: Will not play while recording, FF jumps back to the start, only 16 timer entries

The Bottom Line: 
I took it back and got a Panasonic DMRE85H instead

Author's Review
I bought the ILO DVDRHD04 at Wal-Mart for $278 + tax = $302 total, but I am returning it to get a Panasonic DMRE85H for $380 at Amazon instead.

The picture quality is good. The instructions for set-up and use are adequate, although the wording is odd in a few places. The navigation to select what to play was intuitive and simple. Programming the timer recording was straightforward, but requires many button pushes to get the job done.

The most serious problem is that you cannot play while recording. My primary mode is to view recorded programs in the evening. Other programming is apt to be on that I want to record, which cannot be accomplished with this product. The “time-slip” function is primitive. You can freeze the output to the TV, and then resume play while the same program continues to record. However, the program is automatically erased afterward, so you cannot do this with a program that you want to save. On the other hand, if you are recording a program to save, you cannot watch the beginning of it as the rest is being recorded. Also, you cannot program future timed recordings, view the schedule of recordings, or use any other function while something is being recorded.

I have a Panasonic DVD recorder that lacks a hard drive, but it allows viewing while simultaneously recording. You can view the same program that is being recorded, or a different one. Thus, you can let part of a program be recorded, then begin viewing the beginning of the program which is already recorded, skipping over the commercials and uninteresting parts, then finish about the same time that the broadcast finishes. This function isn’t possible with the ILO unit.

The ILO has a fast forward to skip commercials, with a choice of 2X, 4X, 8X or 16X speeds. The 16X is not very fast, compared with the 100X max FF/ FR speed on the Panasonic. Thus, it takes about 20 seconds to run thru 5 minutes of commercials, which is not too bad. When zipping through boring programming, which may last longer than 5 minutes, a faster speed would be welcome.

A major problem is that after fast forwarding past the commercial, when you push the play button, the critter often jumps back to where you started, at the beginning of the commercials!! It doesn’t do this always, and I have not figured out how to prevent this from happening. The instructions do not say anything about this. It is immensely frustrating to finally get through the commercials, and then jump back to the start again. This by itself makes me not want to own it.

Another quirk is that after the one-touch recording ends, the unit stays on, so that any scheduled timer recordings do not get recorded. Most units power off after the OTR ends. The first night I had the unit, I programmed the recording of 2 programs later in the night, then say an interesting program which I captured with OTR. The unit stayed on all night, and so skipped the recording of the other 2 programs.

The navigate arrow buttons register two clicks unless you touch them very briefly. You get accustomed to this so it isn’t so bad.

If you push buttons on the remote too fast for the unit to keep up, it sometimes freezes and requires unplugging to restore. This happened twice the day I was trying it out. No harm done, and after you learn how to use the buttons this is probably avoidable.

The timer function only accepts 16 entries, which is not nearly enough.

Setting the timed recording takes a lot of keystrokes. It is simple to figure out how to do this, but tedious to accomplish. The Panasonic user interface is equally easy to understand, but much faster to use, with helpful defaults.