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295 of 303 people found the following review helpful.
Magnavox beats the old Toshiba
By Clinton Murray
I have a Toshiba HDD recorder and was looking for another one at ebay. After bidding on various of them and losing because the bids went too high I learned of the Magnavox. I in the first place considered the 513 because it was for less and it is 320 GB was big sufficient for me. Then I found out that the 515 is not just a more spectacular hard drive, but has an bettered remote and saves your settings for an hour in case of a power failure, not similar to the 60 seconds of the 513. Now that I have this one I like it better than my Toshiba. Toshiba has chapter mute which allows you to without any delay skip commercials, that the Magnavox does not, but in almost each other way the Magnavox is more commodious to use. Besides that, I made too a great deal of errors watching football with the instant skip and jump too far in front when there was no clear mute among mercantile and program. If I am recording a program with the Magnavox and want to start out watching from the beginning all I have to do is press the play button and it without delay starts playing from the beginning and turns on the TV and receiver at the same time with Fun-link enabled on the Magnavox. (Note: This will only work with a TV that has the CEC function, which likewise will have to be enabled. My Samsung TV requires a high speed HDMI cable, minimum 1.4.) With the Toshiba I had to press time slip and reverse search to get to the beginning. This is so much less complicated and no more discouraging and hindering errors like at times happened with the Toshiba. If you wanted to stop a timer recording with the Toshiba you had to get up and press stop two times on the the base unit. That prevents you from without advance planning stopping a recording. Magnavox does it by pressing stop twice on the remote, much simpler. I necessitated my reading glasses to find the stop button on the Toshiba. You may program two successive programs with just a 2 second gap; a 1 minute gap on the Toshiba. This also has 1.4 HDMI, which is indispensable in connecting to my new 3D TV. It also links to my TV, so if I turn on the recorder it likewise turns on my TV and selects the rectify input and audio source. It also has a digital tuner so I have connected my old antenna to it as well as my fiber optic TV. I can’t fine tune the picture like I could with the Toshiba, but my TV lets me adjust the video settings for each input and saves the settings.
158 of 160 people found the following review helpful.
Basically a DVR with a DVD Burner
By Charles Dana
Tired of paying almost $200 per month to my cable company, I decisive to ditch one of my DVR’s and replace it with an HDD DVD burner with digital tuner. After all, a lot of programs is worthy of to be burned to DVD and held “forever” rather than being recorded to a hard drive on a DVR unit that will at last fail or be turned in. I purchased the Magnavox MDR515H from Amazon after visiting two local Best Buy stores. Neither carried any DVD burners. Bottom line, the popularity of these units is nowhere near VCR levels.
111 of 113 persons found the following review helpful.
Great DVD recorder with hard drive
By Mark S. Detwiler
This recorder fits my needs perfectly and was precisely what I was looking for. I refuse to receive the business models of Tivo or the Satellite/cable company policy of renting these widgets and paying a on a monthly basis fee. You can’t own them outright! The Moxi is merely too expensive. I had this device hooked up in minutes and was recording to both DVD and the HDD in no time. The picture quality to HDD is excellent. It isn’t HD but Standard Definition (SD) but I’m not using this machine to archive collectables. Just time record, watch once then erase. There are a great deal of choices to connecting this device depending on your situation, i.e cable but no cable box, antennea only, satellite/cable box, etc… In my circumstance I merely had this unit connected to my Elite Pioneer AV receiver by way of the RCA audio/video input/outputs. I use an HDMI cable for playback to achieve the upconversion to 1080p. My Cox Digital Cable box is connected to my AV receiver. Note there is no HDMI Input. This is not an oversight from Magnavox. No DVD recorder or DVR device sold in the US may have an HDMI input.
To those who connect these type of appliances to AV Receivers with DTS digital audio decoders, note that for DVD playback this unit will not stream DTS, if the DVD has such encoding. Not an issue for me since likewise have a blu ray player that may do this. Probably not an issue with most any individual who would read this but I thought I would mention it.
Update 06/28/2011 -
I’ve been recording spacious on this machine, both to HDD and DVD for over two months now with no problems. I perfectly love it! I just purchased a second machine from Amazon before these units become too hard to find.
Sadly, the era of DVD recording (or even HDD) with decks like these is coming to an end soon from my observation. Fewer and less makers are making DVD recording decks anymore, altho admittedly the HDD assortment were always few in number. About the only selections buyers will have soon is TiVo with subscription, renting DVR’s from your cable/satellite provider or the very pricey Moxi if it survives.
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