Lite-on 5045 Dual Format DVD Recorder with 160GB Hard Drive

November 4, 2007 | By Doug In DVD Recorders |

Lite-on 5045 Dual Format DVD Recorder with 160GB Hard Drive
Forget about the running out of recording space. With the built in160GB HDD( Hard Disk Drive) you may record up to 198 hours ( SLPmodes) of quality video programs on it. The coexistence of theoptical disc drive and the built-in HDD on LVW-5045 doesn

Customer Review: Nooooooooooo- don’t do it……
Fantastic machine for a couple of months when did everything it said on box, then problems began- dvd player stopped recording, then didn’t want to play dvd’s that had been recorded on it, then stopped playing original feature film dvd’s, even though a ?20 dvd player in the kids room played everything we threw at it, then hard drive crashed and we lost all the kids programmes that had slowly been built up on it, hard drive still worked but has crashed another two times losing everything on drive and finally died the other week when it came up with a fatal error message- built in hard disk utilities within the liteon don’t work! If you want one of these don’t waste too much money- I paid ?250 for mine - absolute waste of money! Don’t pay more than ?20 and then don’t expect it to last for long this is a disposable item… By the way the hdd has been ripped out chucked in an icy box and now works fine when attached to my pc- although all the recordings had gone- so couple of quid retrieved there.

Customer Review: Loved it when it worked!
I bought this back in ‘05 for 1p short of ?300 and at first it did everything it said on the box, apart from the odd crash which I could live with.

BUT… after about a year of use it started to get fussy about the blank DVD’s it wanted to record on, just spitting them out with ‘Invalid Disc’ errors. Then it decided it didn’t really want to record on any discs… DVD+R,-R,+RW,-RW. I bought various cake boxes of blank DVD’s including Ritek and Taiyo Yuden (not cheap), both on the Lite-on recommended disc list and generally regarded as ‘bullet proof’. I could just about live with this as the hard drive is large and I also have a PC to copy discs and export DV to. However, now it doesn’t read DVDR’s either! It plays the odd bought DVD but anything recorded on a DVDR just doesn’t work. I’ve updated the firmware but… nothing.

So now what I’m left with is a machine that just records off the TV. I’ve had to buy a separate DVD player to sit on top and I have my freeview box sitting on top of that. Not the neatest set-up to have stuck under your TV.

What annoys me most is while it worked it was great and I bought my dad the Lite-On 5025 80Gb model for his birthday. But even after very light use and infrequent recording to DVDR, his is now starting to suffer from the same problems I had. Fortunately it is JUST inside the guarantee so will be going back and hopefully will get repaired first time.

If you’re considering a lite-on product I would seriously think again. I’ve spent close to ?500 on these two recorders in little over 2 years and they’re both on their last legs.

Sony RDR-GX120 Dual Format / Dual Layer DVD Recorder
DVD+R/+RW, +R double layer disc recording.
Used Price: ?54.99
Customer Review: No problems so far
I ordered this product with much trepidation bearing in mind some of the negative earlier reviews. However, I wanted a cheap DVD recorder to archive material from my Sky+ hard disk, and this model was recommended to me elsewhere (and does have some good reviews elsewhere on the web). I’m pleased that so far the machine does exactly what I want. It’s easy to set up (I just connected SCARTs to my TV and Sky+ box; I didn’t bother with the aerial), the manual is OK, and I was surprised by how easy it is to use - as soon as I figured out that: (i) the correct set-up for the outputs is video/video-RGB/video (thanks for another review on Amazon for this), and (ii) you have to select the input (as Line 3 - otherwise if you switch the TV off the recording will stop! The quality of the recording is fine, even on the lower standards, and the discs play back just fine on my Mac. The sound recording level is a bit on the low side, though. The recorder looks OK, too, although the remote feels a bit cheap. I haven’t noticed any particular noise, and formatting is acceptably fast to me. As I say, my needs are rather specific, and if I wanted to do more I might find some of the problems others report. Also I’ve only had it a week, so there’s still time for the other problems to manifest themselves!
Customer Review: Disgusting waste of money
For starters we nearly didn’t get this dvd recorder because the 3rd party company that amazon jipped us into buying from didn’t leave a second ‘failed delivery’ slip so they nearly got away with our money and no product. As for the recorder? Well its aweful. I own a panasonic 5.1 surround sound with dvd recorder. Its awesome, quick recording and so many brilliant functions. My parents used it and decided to get one instead of sky plus. I looked on here and recommended this one as it had great reviews and it sony. You’d think that would be enough? Turns out this recorder is one of the worst i’ve ever come across. When you turn it on it takes forever to load the disks. The remote is aweful and navigating the menus becomes a drawn out affair. It takes about 2 mins to write to disk if you record for more than half an hour and decided it doesn’t like recording on the timer and sometimes skips record times. It doesn’t even support JPEGS!!! It doesn’t support all disks so i really can’t see why you would pay ?119.99 for it. Its quite horrific so just stay clear.

Sharp DVRW360H DVD/VCR Recorder Combi with progressive scan
Amazon Price: ?134.98