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United Arab Emirates, Abu Dhabi
1 Level
720 Review
35 Karma

Review on πŸ“€ Sony DVDirect VRDMC10 Independent DVD Recorder/Player (Black) by Joseph Quade

Revainrating 3 out of 5

Don't expect DVD quality from ripping VHS tapes.

They've already released a new model but I don't know how it compares to this one, although the only visible difference is the color of the device. - Rub out. I think most of the reviews don't mention the fact that if you rip VHS tapes, some of them at the lowest quality that will fit you 6 hours of recording, you will be very disappointed with the result. It records the quality of your VHS tape, and the quality of all VHS tapes is much lower than what we expect from DVDs, especially on higher resolution TVs. I found the instructions confusing, as did others here. I have a Sony VHS but when you rip the DVD machine doesn't tell you how much space/time is left on the DVD you are creating and how much space/time it takes to burn to the VHS tape. Forget it when you have 6 hours on the tape. Even 2 hours is too long to copy to 1 DVD. I've also found that recording starts automatically when you plug everything in! This doesn't give you the option to set the VHS tape where you want to start dubbing, and you can't do this if you don't have VHS hooked up to your TV - the workaround is to use the big "pause" "to press " when it starts recording automatically, which usually ends up with a tiny movie in the DVD menu anyway. After creating 5 DVDs on the Sony VDDMC10 I had worse results than I was hoping for. Part of it is the lack of a headphone jack, so you can "hear" and see what's being recorded. And the fact that the recording starts before you're ready. Another thing is that all recording on a DVD device happens in real time .Don't expect it to make a DVD at 16x, but you can do it on your computer if you need extra copies.The only solution I didn't try to improve was connecting the TV to an old one s to connect a VHS device. So you can play the VHS tape first to establish where you want to start recording and get an idea of how much space/time you'll need as you'll probably need more than 1 DVD to record what is on a full VHS tape. I only bought it to make copies of my old VHS tapes. This will probably get better as I'm well versed in many different methods of copying different sources like camcorders and memory cards, but be prepared to make a lot of "stands" and spend a lot of time in the process. For example I thought he was recording so I left the car for an hour and when I came back I found it had stopped (the button was blinking) and wasn't recording properly. There are disappointments. I have a Canon HD camcorder and haven't tried dubbing with it yet, mainly because other reviews said it doesn't work if it's not a Sony. I hope to try that soon.

Pros
  • Video transfer from Sony HDD/DVD/Memory Stick Handycam camcorders
Cons
  • poorly thought out