User Reviews of the Philips DVDR5500 Dvd Recorder
Wanted a DVD recorder with built-in Freeview, saw this and thought, “Wow! Has upscaling, USB port for flash drive reading, looks stylish, and cheap too!”. This all may be true, but what I didn”t know until I got it home and set it up was how irritating it is to use! The menu system is very unresponsive, taking literally several seconds to respond to a simple ”down” on the remote. As a result, it can take minutes to scroll down a few pages of the Program Guide.
The firmware needs some serious de-bugging. I had this unit no more than 2 days, and it ”froze” on me more than six times. Each time I was doing nothing more complicated than accessing a DVD, viewing pitcures from my USB pen, or simply browsing the Program Guide for something to watch! The only solution when it hangs is to pull the plug (even says so in the manual) as there’’s no power switch. But the worst thing for me was the image aspect ratio distortion.
Digital broadcasts displayed beautifully when watched live, but if recorded to DVD then played back they would be stretched vertically, making them totally unwatchable. Oddly, setting the TV Shape option to Widescreen (I have an older PAL 4:3 screen), would correct the playback distortion problem, but render live broadcasts as vertically stretched instead. On the plus side, the interface looks very swish, the DVD recording quality is excellent, and upscaling to 1080 is well performed.
The facia is very stylish, and the front USB and DV ports are neatly hidden behing a flip-down panel. You can”t pause live TV with this unit though, which I presumed you could - my fault for not reading the specifications! I performed a firmware upgrade, downloaded from Philips web-site, which was very easy to do. Although I only had the unit setup for another hour or so, I didn”t experience any more ”freezing” of the interface.