Daewoo DF4100P

Transferring of VHS to DVD is a great option with the Daewoo DF4100P DVD recorder, especially if you have some old home videos. Sadly, I find that when I record from VHS, or from TV to disc, after about 40 minutes the playback on the DVD disc starts to go a bit awry. The picture turns pixelated and keeps pausing. I think there is a flaw in the real-time recording unit (from one to the other). Then again, I may have got a bogey, so I must check it out. Also, every now and again I have to re-tune the first 9 TV channels, as they seem to get wiped off!?!

Generally, all round it's perfect for transferring from VHS tape to DVD, but I wouldn't buy a Daewoo again, but it will do for now!

I bought my Daewoo DF4100P DVD recorder a couple of months ago, and I have been extremely pleased with everything about it. I'd heard that DVD recorders are very tricky to use, but this one is a doddle. The menu system is very intuitive with the exception, that annoyingly, pressing up and down on a menu will change the selected option rather than move up or down to the next. You have to press left or right to move up or down!!!??? I still make the odd mistake by doing that. Other than that though, it is brilliant.

You can record 1, 2, 4 or 8 hours onto a standard DVD, and frankly I can't tell the difference in quality from 1 to 8. There are all the little features you'd expect to find, such as one touch record to just record what you're watching. A useful feature of that, is that if you do that you can then press the button again as many times as you like, and it will record 15 minutes for each time you press it. So, if a half hour programme comes on and you want to go to bed, you just press record three times and it will switch itself off after 30 minutes.

Possibly the best feature of all is the one-touch Video to DVD or DVD to Video function. I have several home videos that I've been trying to get transferred to DVD, but I hadn't had much luck. With this unit I just put the tape and a blank DVD in and press a button, and it does it completely automatically. Brilliant!!

When you record anything at all, the unit creates a menu with thumbnails of all the recordings with the date and time stamped next to them. The picture can be changed, as can the text on the stamp. So, I now have my 20 year old wedding video, 10 year anniversary video, and a family do this Christmas on a single DVD with a menu showing screens from each of them. All this was done completely automatically.

The unit plays Region 2 DVD's, but I'm told that if you go to the system info screen and type 1101, a region selector pops up. You can type 0 there and the unit becomes region free. I would not of course do that... ahem...

Go and buy one. It is easy to use and excellent value for money at about £150, and it plays video's.