Lite-On LVW-5004

After careful review of online opinions from many owners, I decided to break my golden rule of "no unknown (to me!)" brands and "no cheap electronics" and invested in this model.

First disappointment was to find no manual in the box - remedied with a visit to the company website and a download.

After tuning in, my first DVD recording from a strong ariel signal was pale and washed out looking - and tweaking the tuner didn't improve things. Attempting to record via SCART lead from a VCR produced similar washed out results.

Testing playback using pre-recorded DVDs again produced pictures only on par with VHS - though to be fair, the machine did play Region 1 discs after the appropriate "hack" was used.

After three noisy hours, the software gave up and refused to talk to the remote control. I gave up too and obtained a refund next day. Will be saving up for a more expensive famous brand model instead.

The LiteOn LVW-5004 is very easy to use, a very good menu system, also used it to copy vhs tape to cdr, put video camera onto RW discs, cannot fault it, even the 6 hour recording is of excellent quality.

Bought 5005 from Argos which had few problems which if I could have been bothered could have been sorted with firmware upgrade, downloadable from Liteon website. Argos replaced with 5004, slimmer bronze unit. Records on all media including cd-r/rw which is handy for the odd episode of Eastenders. For the price a very good easy to use recorder.

My first machine was a Goodmans (forget the model no.) cost - £150, difficult to use and just kept crashing, had to keep pulling the plug out. Second machine was the LiteOn 5004, not sure of that but it was the same as my next one which was the 5002, except the 5002 did not play CD's, but did have video+, both sometimes crashed when using re-writes and kept freezing on replay, so have taken that back to Currys and now have nothing, so am looking at the market for something descent.