Review on Philips DVDR3576H Recorder 160GB Built by Shane Mack

We bought this unit to replace our VHS video recorder for recording TV programs from the new digital radio waves. This is a significant advance over the old analog technology, but it's not in the realm of high resolution at all. As far as it's designed for recording TV shows, it does an excellent job. Its interface for show programming is much the same as vintage VCRs from the 1990s, although one of the biggest design flaws is that the programming is not retained when the power is turned off: power failure for more than a few minutes and all your programs will be destroyed. It seems pretty silly to me that a device with such recording capacity lacks a back-up programming system like flash memory. The overall image quality is a significant improvement over analogue radio waves and tape recordings. Recording in HQ mode offers the same picture quality as watching a DVD, but note that HD TV programs are down-converted to Standard Def by the tuner. So it's useless to use its tuner to watch live HD programs if you have an HDTV; I don't even do that with the nifty live pause feature. Thankfully, it has a pass-through antenna like old VCRs, so you can easily bypass its tuner. Using a hard drive makes it possible to record very long shows in HQ mode (and there are a lot of those), watch one recorded show while recording another show (I've tried this and it works great) and of course instant access to any recorded one Show (yes, a burned DVD works too, but definitely not the others). I haven't used the DVD player/recorder other than to try it out and I doubt I'll ever use it much. Some have complained that the picture is too dark when using HDMI, I've experienced this too, although this was due to the HDMI device's black level setting on my TV being set to 'low'; Setting this option to "normal" fixed this issue. In general, this device is an excellent replacement for an outdated VCR for those who still only use free air. I just wish it was better with HD stuff; Obviously, being able to record and play back HD (which is NOT the case) would be the icing on the cake.