By Padusi

lg dvd recorder

The DR4812W is a multi-format DVD recorder, meaning you can pop any of the most common types of DVD recordable media into it and just start recording, without having to worry about whether it’s plus or minus. One small catch, though: the DR4812W doesn’t support the less common DVD-RAM media. Depending on your choice of media, you’ll also have a number of recording options open to you — broadly speaking, the write-once plus and minus media is the least flexible, moving up in options with -RW media and into the best possible option choices with +RW media.

The DR4812W supports multiple recording modes, ranging from 1 hour at best possible quality on a 4.7GB disc up to six hours.

However, as a reviewer notes, it took some time to get to grips with the system’s remote control, mainly because most of the buttons, aside from the very regular playback buttons, are all the same size — including the record button. That means it takes a little bit of visual checking to make sure you’re hitting the right button, rather than just being able to ‘feel’ where the correct choice is.

One feature on the remote sure to appeal to hard core couch potatoes is instant skip button, which steps forward in a recording exactly 15 seconds — hit that a couple of times and you won’t even notice any ad breaks in recorded TV broadcasts. We’re sure that TV executives would be less thrilled with that button, but from the consumer side it’s a bit of a godsend.

In playback terms the DR4812W’s a perfectly capable unit. You’ll certainly notice the compression at the highest rates, especially for any broadcast involving lots of action, but with single -R/+R discs going for only a couple of dollars each these days, you’ll probably not need to go to the full compression extremes all that often. One catch we did find — and it’s not terribly well covered in the DR4812W’s manual — is that everything but DVD+RW media needs to be finalized within the player before it’ll be readable in other DVD players. That process took less than a minute each time it was tested with it, but without doing so you’ll be left scratching your head wondering if you’ve just created an expensive coaster. As with most DVD recorders, the DR4812W is Macrovision enabled.

The DR4812W’s isn’t the absolute cutting edge in DVD recorders. It can’t do the time-skipping tricks that hard drive enabled players can, for a start. Still, it’s a great introduction to DVD recorders. It’s capable and easy enough to use with multiple media formats, as well as relatively inexpensive.