Lite On LVW-5005 DVD Recorder

3 months ago, I read all the reviews on the Lite-On LVW-5005; some were good, some bad. I bought it anyway since it had the most features for the money and usually the bad reviews are from people who don't know what they're doing (you know, people who don't know you have to finalize a disc before it will play in another DVD player). I was wrong, the negative reviews were all justified.

The unit worked well enough for the first couple of months. I even went to the Lite-On web site and downloaded the latest upgrades (burned to CD-R then loaded in the player). Everything was at first. It was able to record from TV and VCR (also DV but I don't have a DV camcorder so I couldn't try it). However, the fan and drive motor are so noisy I had to turn up the volume on the TV. My plan was to record all my old VHS home movies to DVD+RW, transfer to my PC to add some nice menus, then burn to DVD+R. Unfortunately, the 5005 only records in a weird format called DVD-VR (not the standard DVD-Video). This format (not to be confused with disc types DVD+/-R/W) severly limits the menus that can be added (basically its a simple, automatically generated menu), and makes it imposible to be read by most PC DVD editing programs and many older stand-alone DVD players. It was never very fast to read discs when you first put them in, but it seemed to take longer and longer as the weeks went by. The final blow came when one day it just decided not to read discs any more. Even discs that were recorded on the 5005 came back as "Invalid Disc". Fortunately, I bought the unit at Walmart and the 90 day return period had not yet expired (actually, it was a few days over, but I got a nice lady and the customer service desk). Say what you will about Walmart, but at least they take things back. Lucky for me, they don't sell this model any more (I wonder why), so I got my money back instead of a new 5005.