DVD technology has been with us in the UK for several years and is now widely accepted as the winner in the race to replace the humble VHS machine, most homes are now DVD equipped giving vastly improved picture and audio quality as well as interactive features or "extras" as they are badged. However the DVD machines shipped to our shores lacked one key feature of VHS that ability to record.

The annoying part of this is that the IT community had DVD-R (DVD recordable) technology for a while now although primarily for data rather than video, perhaps piracy worries slowed the arrival of a domestic DVD-R machine pitched at the home entertainment market, or maybe the manufacturers were just waiting until the stock of DVD player only units had reached an acceptable level.

Whatever the explanation this year has finally seen the arrival of the domestic machine at a price that can be afforded, Phillips are leading the way with a range on DVD-R kit.

The DVDR70 is the cheaper cousin of the fully featured DVDR80, but offers much better for value at sub £240, typically most units can work with both DVD-R (record once media) and DVD-RW (re-writeable) which is more akin to the VHS tape of old, both formats can hold up to 6 hours of AV recordings dependant on the level of compression (record quality) selected, the Phillips has 6 levels. Be warned however that to get quality comparable with a pre recorded DVD your disk will only give you 2 hours and to get 6 the picture is little better than VHS and struggles with fast moving video like movies or sports, in tests we'd advise recording at about the 2.5hr mark.

Setup of the Phillips unit is fairly straight forward and in true LP.com fashion we didn't need to refer top the user guide which is lucky as it doesn't seem exactly comprehensive, DVD - DVDR  copying is possible of course with the permission of the copyright holder! and your recordings are Dolby Pro logic compatible if the source is encoded in this way.

The visual table of contents is a real bonus allowing you to see thumbnails of your recordings on screen, this is just as well as sadly the fast fwd / rwd function is fixed to work in steps x4, x8 etc.... rather than a more linear search method. The DVDR70 can also utilise Video+ and showview to make timer recordings off analogue / DTT / Cable or Sky.

In summary this is an excellent piece of kit and only lets itself down in poor instructions and the lack of a supplied scart lead? The age of the DVD-R is well and truly here at a price we can afford, so what are you waiting for?

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