RCA DRC8300N DVD Player/Recorder and VCR Combo

Product Review

Incorporating DVD recording, progressive-scan DVD playback, and a 4-head hi-fi VCR, RCA's DRC8300N offers numerous features to enhance your viewing and recording. The player/recorder gives you a choice of recording your favorite television shows and home videos straight to DVD or to VHS tape. It stores digital video in high-quality MPEG2 and encodes audio in space-saving MP3. For playback, Scene Again instant replay accesses previously viewed DVD or tape segments in 10-second increments, and a 30-second "advance" function lets you skip ahead to preferred scenes on either DVDs or tape.

With just a couple button presses, you can transfer your home videos from a VHS tape directly to a DVD with no cables to connect, no levels to set. More sophisticated editing is also a snap with programmable tape playback, letting you select only those scenes you want to copy before recording to disc. You can even split titles or hide unwanted chapters after recording the content to a DVD+RW disc.

The RW format offers numerous advantages. These discs can be played in most computer DVD-ROM drives and DVD players, and you let you append, edit, and overwrite video right on the discs themselves. This means you can record video using the DRC8300N and record data with a PC drive, all on the same disc. There's only one recording mode for both video and data, and the finalization time for a DVD+R is the fastest of all DVD formats.

Special features include DVD title and chapter creation for easy access to recorded materials; chapter hide/unhide, which lets you skip playback of selected sections of a recording; text title labeling; user-selectable disc write and title-write protection, and quick disc erase. Recorded discs will playback on most DVD players, and the unit itself plays all DVD and audio CDs.

More than just a recording device, however, the DRC8300N is also a first-rate media player, offering MP3 music file decoding and Digital PhotoView, which displays JPEG files (from recordable CDs only) in a rotating slide show format--with MP3 playback during the slide show.

And, whether your living room is currently home to an HDTV or you're merely thinking of "someday," the DRC8300N is ready to deliver the full potential of prerecorded DVDs. Progressive scanning, called 480p for the number of horizontal lines that compose the video image, creates a picture using twice the scan lines of a conventional DVD picture, giving you higher resolution and sharper images while eliminating nearly all motion artifacts.

An onscreen DVD library stores up to 400 titles so you can easily sort and locate any title you've recorded using the DRC8300N. You can even find the discs with the most available blank space for new recordings. The onscreen keyboard makes it easy to create and edit program names for all your personal recordings. Choose from six recording modes, from 1 to 8 hours, while SmartRecord automatically adjusts the quality of the recording to fit the available remaining space.

Other features include S-video inputs for simple recording and playback from camcorders, a time-base corrector, and digital noise reduction circuitry, which eliminates picture jitter and even reduces noise from videotape playback to significantly improve the quality of recordings from videocassette recorders or camcorders.

Easily integrated into an existing home theater, the DRC8300N includes a Dolby Digital and DTS-compatible optical digital-audio output, 2 composite-video inputs, 1 composite video output, analog audio inputs and outputs, an RF coaxial input/output, and a component-video output.

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