Well, I just purchased it-- although I haven't had any chance to play with it as I have to work today...always a bummer. This is my third attempt to buy a dvd recorder. When I got home, I noticed the CyberHome only had a 3 month warranty, so owing to poor salesmanship it went back. The next was the Philips DVDR75. I only noticed two flaws. One was minor and one was major, although I cannot be abolutely sure the major fault was the recorders and not the component that the feed came from, but I'm fairly confident. I did a FW upgrade, the unit didn't work after that and failed POST. But I did like the unit and the only flaw I'm absolutely sure of isn't noted in the 615 manual...like it was in the 75. I'll check it out myself and report...
report back, june 6: Well, the minor flaw is continued or atleast seems to be... When a +r disc is edited, the edits are only final on the recorder itself. Testing on my old panasonic 5 disc dvd player produced the original unedited movie with the default bookmark every five minutes. Giving the unit the benefit of the doubt, I tested the movie on the iMac at work. It produced exactly the same results. As I said, this is a minor flaw in my eyes...well, sort of... I don't understand why it can make permanent index picture changes and background changes, but bookmarks cannot be made permanent. As I understand it, this problem doesn't exist with +rw discs.
One negative note: The 615 comes with a zeroxed sheet on "Important Info for DVD+RW Recorded Disc." It details a forced erase of a 'bad' disc. When I researched this unit, the manual available online at http://www.philipsusa.com had this information as well as information that attempts to save the disc data. The fact that only the disc erase procedure is a highlight sheet can't be anything but bad news...
Have you actually gotten any problems with the force erase you speak of? The reason I ask is that I see no xeroxed sheet in my box. I'm curious if it's actually something I really should be worried about.
The fact that it didn't play the edited version of my dvd+r discs on my regular dvd player kinda irked me as well. I haven't tried it when done on a dvd+rw like you said but I'll take a looksie if by burning first on RW and then transfering to an R would keep the bookmarks.
But yeah.. let me know about the force erase thing.. Thanks!
I finally headache problems with this machine but only (and my guess is) when I started using 4x DVD+RW on it. That's when the xeroxed sheet came into play but even its suggestions didn't help much. I kept on getting disc errors and such. However, it seems that this only started when I changed from using a 2x rewritable to a 4x one (cuz that's what they had at Best Buy and I thought the write speeds wouldn't affect anything).
I've been using Fujifilm 2x DVD+R/+RW for a whole month with no problems whatsoever. I'm gonna try to go back to that kind of disc and hopefully, my headaches with the 4x +RWs and this machine will end.
Anybody else out there have experiences with this machine and/or the media that they've used?
I think I'm using 4x media. I think it's brand more than speed, but I'm just speculating... I've heard that the original Philips brand media was so aweful that you would buy a pack of 25 and get 12 good discs. One of the main Best Buy computer guys goes to my church, so we always get pretty honest (what the guy really thinks) feedback about products when we go to Best Buy. I really wish that I could easily wirelessly feed all my components in the living room to the computer and use a computer drive, but I wanted ease of use for my wife and me, however, I've gotten something that's easy for me to use and somewhat difficult for her to use. I can't help but think that I maybe should have gotten all the guts for my computer. I can do what I want with RW, but I can't transfer the RWs to Rs easily. An internal 8 gig hard drive would be plenty for such a disk copy... I think my expectations for these units are atleast 5 years away at the price I want to pay...
Well, I've found that The Philips will not let you copy copy protected tapes with either the coax input or rca cables. So when I copied Searching For Bobby Fischer, it copied because they didn't put any copy protection on the tape...
