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Review: Philips have chosen not to go down the slim line route with this DVDR880 DVD recorder so it is quite an imposing bit of kit but as it has a stylish 'silver' face to it you don't have to worry about it looking out of place. Philips have adopted the +R/+RW format and as they claim to play back on 80% of the current DVD players and DVD-ROM drives it should not raise any compatibility issues. In practice I have not experienced any problems in playing these. Set-up is reasonably straightforward despite the manual not being particularly logical in its layout. You can record in one of 5 quality levels but as each one compresses the data more you do notice a drop in quality at the lower settings. The HQ (60min) level gives as broadcast quality playback, with only the LP (180min) and EP (240min) levels starting to show the drop off. Once you have recorded you can carry out various edits. Some of these are dependant on the discs used, as there are some restrictions for the +R, as these cannot be overwritten. The most useful being able to insert Chapter marks as the sections between these can be hidden so that play back skips over them. Using this facility allows you to effectively edit out the adverts. Editing is carried out via an on-screen overlay menu using the remote. This is most probably the weakest part of the 880. The overlay menu can make it difficult seeing the picture beneath and this is made worse when you hide a chapter as it darkens the picture more. The remote itself is not that user friendly for editing as most of the functions are carried out by just a few keys and these have different actions depending if the picture is paused or playing. As there is space on the remote I really feels Philips could have included dedicated editing keys for this. Despite this the actual editing part works well with accurate insertion of chapters etc. As an entry to recordable DVD the Philips has little in the way of competition. Picture quality is superb (especially via RGB) at the higher settings and with the price dropping weekly it's more and more of a bargain. | 
DVD, TV & Video
