Sony RDR-GX7 DVD Recorder

I do not personally own this unit - I am reviewing a friends recorder which he picked up in July, 2003.

Recording

This box appears to function perfectly as a recorder - at least if the frame of reference is the functionality of a good 'ol VCR. The unit will create a reasonable default menu of all the titles on a disc once finalized - otherwise you get a "in process menu" showing recordings to that point. This feature alone makes this superior to the VCR.

Laserdiscs copied to DVD-R are quite good looking - as long as the quality level is set to 2 hours or less. I have seen "The Ice Pirates" on DVD copied from a laserdisc. The video quality was quite good - equalling the source material. Some artifacting can be found in 2 hour mode, especially in action scenes with lots of motion going on - although this is the case for every recorder in the market and is due to restricting the upper limit on the bit rate in order to fit 2 hours of video on the standard disc. Clearly, using a longer length mode will result in lower quality as the cap on max bitrate will be lower.

Playback

Playback of existing DVD's is this players weakest suit. When watching discs from "Star Trek: The Next Generation" seventh season DVD set, considerable artifacting could be seen whenever movement occurred on the screen. If a character simply moved his/her hand, more often than not, would show blurring and sort of jaggy lines in that area of the picture. Testing this disc in a standalone Sony DVD player (or my own Panasonic DVD player as well) showed none of this artifacting. At one point, the playback appeared to pause or stutter a couple of times in succession - and this was not at a layer switch which on most ever DVD player produces just a brief, single pause.

Features

The +VR recording option for DVD-R discs is very cool in that you can do non-linear editing (move chapters/titles around, etc) - BUT, the discs are only playable then in +VR devices. For now, this excludes many of the DVD players on the market today.

A missing feature would be the lack of a hard drive for digital recording/editing. There are Panasonic products at this price point that have this and other user guide features.

Lastly - and this goes for all the players out there - integration with a DirecTV receiver (either directly, or via control link to a standalone box) would be very sought after. Next year, Sony is reportedly going to release a system called the PSX which will have a hard drive, DVD recording, Playstation 1/2 game playing, and DirecTV tuning capabilities. I would suggest waiting for that product personally as it will provide the most bang for your buck (most likely) and also allow Sony to learn from their experience with this unit. Additionally, the technology to encode a variable bitrate signal should improve over time which will allow for improved quality on future models.