By Padusi

The LG DRT389H may not be the easiest DVD recorder to get to grips with, but it’s OK when you get used to it, as the reviewer says. Setting the LG DRT389H between Sky+ box & TV is different to the instructions provided, but if you have half a clue about the signal flow, it all makes logical sense. You just have to fiddle around a little bit.

digital dvd recorder

The reviewer admits that watching up-scaled DVDs with the LG DRT389H really breathes new life into them. You really don’t notice just how much until you go back to watching ‘standard scaled’ DVD’s on another device. All in all, it does everything (and a bit more) that you would expect from a machine even if it’s a little pricier.
Having checked out the reviews and cross referenced with which the decision was made, set up was easy but the instructions were slightly confusing. The multiple disc formats may come in handy in the future. The up-scaling of standard DVDs works perfectly and HD playback is incredible. The initial warm up screen is of low quality and the on-screen instructions are in a similar mode, but don’t be put off by this, as Record/Playback is the most important part and this unit certainly delivers both.

The reviewer bought the LG DRT389H as a replacement for an old DVD player, which had seen long service but was past its best. It was chosen as it supported all formats and had more features than equivalently priced models – and it lives up to the spec. Picture quality is excellent and it’s super easy to use once you know your way around the menus.
But that’s the problem – the manual seems to be written in fluent gibberish, and to record from a digital satellite source, one has to set it up completely differently from any of the illustrations or text in the instructions!

For the money, this is a top notch quality recorder. Setup was fairly easy and managed to connect this between the Sky+ box and the TV, enabling recording from Sky+ hard drive to a blank DVD (music videos, etc). For permanent recordings, Verbatim DVD+R discs as recommended since these have the edge over DVD-R. The LG’s menu takes a bit of getting used to, but read the manual fully. The LG DRT389H Recorder is highly recommended as some of the more expensive makes do not have the features that this machine has.