Sony RDR-VX530 DVD Recorder & VHS Combo Player

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The VX530 is a neat machine and works great. It's easy to use and, so far, produces very good results. One-touch dubbing is as easy as it gets as long as nothing is copy protected. I can vouch for this one... it's a winner.

The only thing to watch out for is buying from Amazon's vendors. The one I bought was supplied by, and shipped by, J&R Electronics. The Sony box was packaged only in a plastic bag and was received in damaged condition. Since factory boxes are usually designed for sitting on store shelves and moderate protection, and not shipping cross country, sure enough the unit was also damaged.

Maybe I had a bad day, but I found J&R Electronics not the easiest people to try to return something to. Anyway, since I was under somewhat of a time constraint, I bought one from Best Buy (and got a better price as well... on sale). The new one, of course, works fine and I'm really happy with the VX530.

Bottom line... Great machine, but be a little careful who you buy from.

Since this is a review of the VX530 and not J&R, five stars for the machine... one star for poor packaging.

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For years I have been meaning to transfer old VHS tapes to DVD in order to preserve family memories. I tried various tools to transfer video via a PC but was disappointed by audio sync issues or the time it took to edit/burn DVDs.

I decided to purchase a Sony RDR-VX530 unit on a whim last month. After checking the reviews on Amazon I almost didn't purchase this unit. I researched other DVD/VHS units but our family has always had good luck with Sony products in the past.

The directions for dubbing a VHS tap to DVD couldn't have been easier: insert a blank DVD, insert VHS tape and press the video dub button. The first tape conversion went so smoothly I couldn't believe it! I didn't add any special chapters or titles but the DVD automatically inserted jump points every five minutes.

Our home videos were taken over the past eight years using two different camcorders. The first set of videos are on VHS-C (compact) format tapes. VHS-C tapes require a special holder/adapter to allow them to play on a standard VHS unit. One of the main reasons for purchasing a VHS/DVD burner was to convert these old tapes without having to use the camcorder output cables. The quality of the audio over those cables was never very good. The playback of the VHS-C videos looked fantastic on the new player.

Most of the video "scenes" were only a few minutes long with gaps between them. If the straight dubbing method was used there would be lots of snow and/or unnecessary gaps between scenes. The RDR-VX530 has a cool feature that makes it easy to dub scenes from VHS to DVD. Get the video to the starting point of the scene and press pause. Select the dubbing option on the system menu. The tape will rewind a few seconds, start to play and then start recording when it gets to the spot you selected. Just make sure you are ready to hit the stop button when the scene ends! This creates separate chapters/scenes on the DVD.

We have been using DVD+R discs for simple VHS conversions. The only "editing" you can do on a DVD+R disc is delete the last scene. If you use DVD-RW or DVD-R discs you can do more advanced editing. Scenes can be moved to different sections of the playlist and you can manually insert chapter marks.

The only cumbersome task (IMO) is adding titles to each chapter using the TV interface. You need to navigate the alphabetical list using the remote to select letters. After a while it seems to get easier but this is the one element of the process that would be easier on a PC.

Bottom line: Old home videos that hadn't been watched in years are now converted to DVD! Now we can make copies of the home movie DVDs on a PC to share with family members or keep off-site for backup.

Read Best Reviews of Sony RDR-VX530 DVD Recorder & VHS Combo Player Here

It seemed pretty simple: Drop in your VHS tape, put in a DVD and press the button that said VHS->DVD. 30 minutes later, the tape is done and I go to the menu to finalize the disc. After a few minutes, I get an error saying that the media is unreadable and the disc cannot be finalized. Three DVD-R/16X discs later, I gave up and searched the net. Other people had problems with it recording to DVD-R. Even though the manual says it can handle 16X, I've got new coffee table coasters that shows it doesn't. Plus the menu interface is confusing and the not intuitive.

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I ordered this particular unit SPECIFICALLY because it advertised the ability to read DVD+/-DL discs. Well guess what? It can't read ANYTHING. Factory DVDs don't load. Custom burned discs don't load. Factory CD audio discs don't load. NOTHING loads. I have a $200+ piece of junk that will cost me another $10-$30 to ship back to RMA to SONY. Ordered from Etronics. Verdict is still out on them (their policy is not to take opened-item returns of SONY products). Shipping was in the regular retail box, but I thought it was suspended/packaged respectably from the factory. Bottom line: major headache. Don't take a chance ordering this online. It's not worth the hassle (especially if the damn vendor doesn't take SONY a/v returns!).

I purchased this unit on 3/7/2007 and returned it the same day. The picture quality is beautiful and it's a Sony, right? Precisely why I returned it. Multiple reviewers complained that the unit will not record from premium cable channels. But I took a chance anyway. I have Cablevision of Long Island, NY and this recorder will not allow a recording to be made from channels such as Starz, Encore, TCM and AMC...it will display a message about copyrighted material. I have a Panasonic and a Samsung dvd recorder....they do just fine on these channels. Sony is notorious for their so called piracy protection designs and if you want to record movies from cable movie channels........absolutely do not buy this recorder!!!