Daewoo DRVT-40 VCR/DVD Combi Recorder

Graham, Camberley, on May 9th, 2008
On the face of it, an attractive proposition. For just shy of £200 from Currys you get in a single machine a VHS Video Recorder and a DVD Recorder with the ability with "One Touch" to copy material between them. Not only that but in addition to the usual SCART connections you also get an HDMI interface with upscaling to 1080i. This is still a relatively unusual feature and one that makes the Daewoo seem to offer amongst the best set of facilities in a single package, on the market. "Seems to" is however, the actual situation. Whilst the box offers reasonable performance the quality of the pictures that it produces falls short of the best, when seen in combination with a Samsung 40" LE-40R88BD, which produces excellent pictures either from the internal Freeview tuner or from an HDMI connected Virgin Media V+ box. Most annoying of all is, however, a fault that was evident on two machines, that it simply will not copy from video to DVD, "One Touch" or not. When trying to copy a video I had personally shot with a camcorder from video to DVD, the machine repeatedly refused, displaying the message "This media cannot be copied" and highlighting the video tape as the culprit. The video tape played perfectly OK in its own right on the same machines though! Clearly reading the tape was not the problem. Bear in mind that this is personal material and in no way copyrighted, the fault can only be with the machine itself. The Daewoo Help Desk could offer no solution and suggested I ask for my money back, implying that I should buy a product from someone else!