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Two cost reco He’s held onto a large library of VHS tapes for decades so Barrie Smith thought he could make good use of the Easter break by engaging with DVD recording. Here are his reactions to a Tevion DD1018 and an AWA DR711 DVD recorder. I t was very much due to our Prime Minister’s urging to ‘spend, spend, spend’ that I fell upon the ALDI catalog with gusto: a DVD recorder for $99! Zipping down to the local ALDI on Easter Saturday, I laid down the plastic and helped the economies of three countries in one swoop: China as the makers, Germany (who own the retailer ALDI) and hopefully, a band of Australian staffers working for the latter. Before getting on to the main topic, I’ve noticed that something funny has been going on in the retailing of disc recorders: there are heaps of DVD recorders with 80/160/250 Gigabyte hard drives as their primary storage and selling for $400-500, with a solitary model at $299. Parallel to this you can get your hands on a couple of Blu-Ray recorders from Panasonic, with prices starting at around $1600. So I felt the arrival of the low-cost Tevion DD1018 was a significant event. Looks and Feel The unit is a neat package in black with external controls placed on the upper edge. A drop-down front panel gives access to composite audio and video inputs, along with a camcorder DV input. 20  Silicon Chip Round the back we face a whole complex of in/outputs: RF in/output loop; composite audio/video in/outputs along with an S-Video output; component Y, Cb/Pb, Cr/Pr inputs are there as well as a pile of audio ports for Dolby 5.1 channel outputs. The remote control does a sterling job by expanding the options via 50 buttons (of which ten are channel numbers) with choices of front or rear composite inputs plus RF, audio volume up/down buttons, all the usual DVD navigation tools, channel selection via the internal analog tuner as well as a timer to record time shifted programs … the Tevion can also ‘one touch’ record at any time. The on-screen menus are well set out and copious in variety. However, due to the nature of DVD and its multiple skills and requirements, you do need a fair amount of study to get it going. This is how I and my teenage son spent Easter Sunday; logging the channels into the menu, assigning program positions and making many test recordings. Little did I know at this stage that this exercise would need to be repeated twice more. Single Layer The Tevion replays DVDs containing NTSC/PAL programming and CD-R/RWs with AIFF and MP3 tracks. Discs with JPEG images are OK as well as Picture CD material, Video CDs, Super VCDs, HDCD and MPEG4. It will also record SD video to Single Layer DVD+/-RW and DVD+/-R media. It will not record to Dual Layer DVDs … but that’s OK I guess, because the recording options are wide. The recording quality choices are shown in the table below, with the highest quality (and shortest time) at the top. QUALITY LEVEL RECORD TIME MBPS RESOLUTION (hours) (MPEG2) HQ High Quality 1 9.716 D1 SP Standard Play 2 5.037 ˝ LP Long Play 3 3.382 LP EP Extended Play 4 2.537 ˝ SLP Super Long Play 6 1.691 SLP ENCODING CBR CBR + VBR ˝ ˝ ˝ siliconchip.com.au o lowDVD orders Review by BARRIE SMITH Early on, I had difficulty in reading the washed-out on screen menu but did eventually work my way through the options. The timer menu was an easy one and compared to VHS machines, offered far more elegant ways to time shift than Ye Olde tape machine. After you choose channel number, date and time of recording commencement you then have only to select the length of recording in hours and minutes taking care to choose the recording quality that will comfortably encompass the record time. Of course, the Muggins way is to select SLP, which gives six hours of recording but at the lowest quality. Thinking users will naturally juggle record time and quality level in their decision-making. Post recording, you must finalise the DVD, with both DVD-R and DVDRW discs. Doing so enables the disc to be played on any other compatible machine, just like a commercial DVD. But doing this changes the disc format so that you can no longer record to it, turning it into a ‘play only’ disc; this makes a DVD-R no longer writeable. By using a DVD-RW platter you can still finalise the disc for replaying in another player, then return it to the Tevion, ‘unfinalise’ it, remove the exsiliconchip.com.au isting programming and accumulate extra recordings, much in the way of Ye Olde VHS but with the attractive advantage of replay access in a random fashion, via on screen icons indicating the programs on offer. It’s a great way to travel! I didn’t get into DVD+R/RW discs; for one thing they are far more expen- sive than DVD-R/RWs and don’t seem to offer any advantages. Back to recording: after you’ve committed pictures and sound to a disc, and before finalising, there is an option to rename the text that accompanies the program icon: you get only 11 characters but I found this is more than enough for an ID. There is The Tevion DVD recorder is styled in black with external controls on the upper edge. A drop-down door reveals the standard yellow (video) and red/ white (stereo audio) inputs along with its DV input. The Tevion’s rear hookup panel has a host of inputs and outputs, including a duplication of the video and audio inputs from the front panel. As you can see, it also features antenna in and out, S-video and more. July 2009  21 Tevion’s on screen display of a JPEG still image. Ignore the digital camera interference lines – this is seriously under-saturated. And this was the better of the two Tevions I tried – I’d taken the first one back already! also an option to select a frame of the program as a visual ID. Another nicety is that the Tevion can insert chapter markers into the program; these will be automatically spaced five, ten and fifteen minutes apart during the recording. By now you’re probably thinking this piece of hardware is a whizzer; well, not quite. The first warning should have sounded when I found the on-screen menu a bit washed out but the penny didn’t drop until I made a recording, and then replayed it. Show me the colour! Where’s all the colour, I cried out? It didn’t matter whether I tweaked the Tevion’s colour saturation/contrast/ brightness, adjusted the TV, darkened the room, pulled the curtains – the colour depth was just not there. Taking the disc to other DVD players (I’ve got three – don’t ask why!) revealed full-bodied colour. A phone call to Tevion tech support elicited the advice to swap the unit at ALDI for another. Which I did. Took it home, re-installed it. This was better; at least now I could read the menus more easily. But the replay was still noticeably desaturated. At this point I decided to run a colour chart past the Tevion, showing the primaries: red, green, blue as well as the complementary hues: cyan, magenta and yellow. It was apparent that the primaries were fine on the Tevion but the system was not delivering magenta (mix of 22  Silicon Chip Compare this off-screen shot of the same Manly ferry image, as displayed by the AWA DR711 recorder. Note how much more saturated the image is and as a result, how much more detail there is. Oh bliss, oh joy! blue and red) or yellow (mix of red and green), whereas the other players were delivering all primaries and complementaries. Not happy, Jan! AWA to the rescue By this time matters had become a little more complex as Big W announced the sale of their entry, a nicely satin-chromed model AWA DR711, with cosmetic differences but with a near-identical feature list and specs. Same factory in China? Possibly. Price? $148. Being a canny shopper I managed to snaffle one just two days before the price dropped to an on-sale special of $128! But the good news was that at last I could see the on-screen menu clearly and matters only got better as I viewed on-air broadcasts and then ran some tests. What a difference! Colours were now fully on while the brightness and contrast range were good. The AWA unit is identical in features and operating modes to the Tevion, while the remote control differs slightly. It is obviously the one to go for. I’m now very happy with my purchase and plan to retire the home VCRs for day-to-day recording. Disc is in. But you’re probably wondering why I bought a DVD recorder with an analog tuner instead of considering a more expensive unit with an inbuilt digital tuner. My attitude is that analog TV transmissions have some years to run before they cease to be broadcast and even after that, I will be able to couple A/V signals from my set-top box to the DVD recorder. In the meantime, I have the use of a DVD recorder at a bargain price. The Tevion screen display of an RGB/CMY chart. The primary colours appear OK on the Tevion but the system does not correctly deliver magenta (mix of blue and red) nor yellow (mix of red and green). It wasn’t an isolated dud: this is the better of the two Tevions I tried before giving up on them and going to AWA. siliconchip.com.au AWA DR711 Specifications Power Supply: .................. AC 100V-240V/50Hz-60Hz, 35W. Signal Modulation: ........... PAL/NTSC. Radium Laser: .................. Wavelength 650nm, 780nm. Frequency Response:........ DVD audio: 4Hz-22kHz (48kHz sample frequency).             4Hz-44kHz (96kHz sample frequency). ......................................... CD audio: 4Hz-20kHz. S/N: .................................. >90dB. Dynamic Range: ............... >90dB. Operating temperature: .... 0-40° C. Video out: ......................... 1.0V (P-P), S-Video out: ..................... (Y) 1.0V (P-P) 75; (C) 0.286V (P-P), 75 Audio output: ................... 2.0V (RMS maximum). Receiving Modulation: ..... PAL I, PAL D/K, PAL B/G, SECAM, L SECAM D/K SECAM B/G. Last Thoughts As we all know, the majority of consumer electronic products is manufactured in China, either under an international monicker like Sony, Panasonic etc or a truckload of generic labels, like Tevion, AWA and many others. With the major brands you can presume the companies keep a strict eye on the products before they reach the market. With generic brands, sold through retail outlets, one can only presume that a similar degree of surveillance is applied before the items are placed on shop shelves before sale. From my experience with these two ostensibly identical DVD recorders it would appear that, in the case of one retailer, this degree of quality control was not maintained. SC SMART PROCUREMENT SOLUTIONS Unit 3, 61-63 Steel Street Capalaba QLD 4157 AUSTRALIA Ph (07) 3390 3302 Fx (07) 3390 3329 sales<at>rmsparts.com.au www.rmsparts.com.au o Resistors o Capacitors o Potentiometers o Crystals o Semiconductors o Optoelectronics o Relays o Buzzers o Connectors o Switches o Hardware o Chemicals & Fluxes While cosmetically different to the Tevion, the AWA has similar specs and operating modes. The rear panel also reveals S- Video input as well as output along with optical audio (Toslink) and coaxial output. Apart from more versatile, it significantly out-performs the Tevion in the colour department. siliconchip.com.au WHOLESALERS  DISTRIBUTORS  KITTING SOLUTIONS     July 2009  23