Producing a DVD on a 'Pro' HDD DVD deck 3-way comparison

September 8, 2005

The author
of this article at EMedia Live had a multi-camera, multi-day event that he had
shot and he wanted to create a 2 DVD set for customers. Normally, he would use a
PC. Powerful, yet time consuming due to digitizing and then compressing the
video into Mpeg-2; he wondered if capturing the data directly to a hard
drive-based DVD deck and then simply use the deck's internal editing,
chaptering, labeling, and dubbing capabilities would result in a decent product
for his customer. Surely, it was faster and could be done minutes after the
event closed. But, in this life as we know, there is a give and take so let's
look at the drives he tried and then check out the article for the details and conclusion.

There
are several DVD deck manufacturers that offer multiple products in the
consumer channel. However, only a few have offerings in the "pro"
channel.

I approached Pioneer about their new
PRV-9200, which is similar to their consumer DVR-520HS. These decks offer
an 80GB hard drive and faster-than-realtime transfer of content from hard
disk to DVD.

Pioneer continues to offer the much more
capable PRV-LX1, which can hold two burners in addition to the 120GB
internal drive, and has direct keyboard/ mouse connection, balanced audio,
component video I/O, and more. This is a true pro DVD deck. It's also much
bigger and about five times the cost of the 9200.

Panasonic was the first to offer a
standalone professional DVD deck, and they have continued to produce
several models with different options and capabilities ever since.
Currently, Panasonic offers their DMR-T6070, which is the pro version of
the consumer DMR-EH50. This deck offers a 160GB hard drive, plus PC and SD
card slots. It now also offers faster-than-realtime dubbing from hard disk
to DVD.

Toshiba recently announced the RD-XS54,
which has a 250GB hard drive and networking capabilities. It also offers
three other important features: the ability to upload custom menu
backgrounds, the ability to edit and add title information to recorded
content from a PC, and the ability to use a PC scroll mouse to control the
recorder for detailed video editing. Though promising, this unit wasn't
slated to ship until late summer, so it was unavailable in time for this
review.

Sony's latest DVDirect recorder is the
VRD-VC20, successor to the VC10. While this does not offer an internal
hard drive, it is far more compact and purposefully built than any of the
other decks, and represents an intriguing alternative strategy, so it was
included in this article for comparison.

JVC offers the SR-DVM70US, which does the
internal HD and DVD recorder one more by adding a MiniDV deck to the mix.
It features a 160GB hard drive and touts 8X high-speed DVD duplication.
Another interesting wrinkle is its touted improvement over other decks'
resolution at recording times between two and four hours. We'll look more
closely at this when we get one into our lab for testing.

There are others out there, but these are
the principal players. For this article, we'll evaluate the Panasonic
DMR-T6070, the Pioneer PRV-9200, and the Sony
VRD-VC20.

For those of you interested in consumer oriented
standalone DVD recording devices that may come with hard drives, feel free to
visit our DVD Recorder & Home Entertainment forum. There you will
find several catagories with several manufacturers mentioned and
discussions on each.

Source: EMediaLive