Pioneer DVR-640H

Are the Best DVD recorders Made by Pioneer?

(Reviewed 1/12/10) One of the best DVD recorders on the market is the Pioneer DVR-640H-S DVD recorder. This DVR has a built-in hard disk with 160GB of space. What does that mean? You get of 340 hours of recording time. OK I confess I love Pioneer DVR/ DVD recorders! I've been using them for about three years and love most of Pioneer’s products. What’s the hitch ? This is an expensive DVD recorder!

Like I said I love Pioneer products but they were always expensive. They were among the first, ahem pioneers, to forge into the DVD recorder market and make some of the best DVD recorders. Some of these early models like the the Pioneer DVD recorder (DVR7000) are still around. This Pioneer DVD recorder is a 1st generation machine and still available! The the Pioneer DVR-320 DVD recorder was another fine DVD recorder. Not use looking for except possibly on eBay.

Let’s get back to the Pioneer DVR 640. In a word- they’re just EASY. That’s what makes them one of the best DVD recorders. It's easy to record from the built in tuner* or from my cable company box. It's easy to edit out commercials, easy to create a title and easy to create short thumbnail video of what you recorded.

Why I like it!

It’s easy to leave your programming on the hard drive or do a high speed copy to DVD. You can transfer full length movies to DVD in about 15 minutes from the hard drive. The default quality setting (SP) produces decent video quality. This gives you about 2 hours on a standard writeable DVD. I love to free up that DVR real estate!. These DVD recorders support DVD-R/RW, DVD-RAM (CPRM3), DVD-R DL, DVD+R DL, DVD+R/RW, CD-R/RW, CD, WMA, JPEG and MP3 formats.

Editing made Easy – No really!

You won’t be limited to just recording and watching a playback either. The Pioneer DVD recorder lets you edit your recordings before transferring them onto a DVD. Easy huh? This is a nice way to assemble a collection of your favorite television shows, minus all those pesky commercials! Additionally, the direct file transfer feature makes it quick and easy to transfer your personal DVDs to the hard disk for making extra copies.

Cool Features

The on-screen menu has an excellent help feature that’s easy to access anytime during the setup. There’s a “commercial skip” feature that easily lets you jump forward at 30 second intervals. You can even use the play, pause or stop feature on the show that you’re currently recording.

The Pioneer plays DVDs, as well as CDs and CDs containing WMA or MPE3 files. The JPEG photo viewer function lets you run a slide show of pictures on your television screen. It features a full function remote, designed to work with a wide variety of televisions. The Pioneer is rated as one of the best DVD recorders on the market and a good consumer choice. I never bothered to set up the VCRplus. I’ve read online that it’s the one feature on this DVR that’s not easy. I’ve read that they are tedious to set up. You need to go thru every channel in the VCRplus list to enter the corresponding channel for your system. Ugh forget that!

Conclusion I highly recommended this product. It’s one of the best DVD recorders on the market. I use this one all the time. Almost everything about it is easy and the features are excellent. If your hard drive starts to fill up you can get that valuable real estate back by transferring your shows to DVDs. Don’t forget you can remove shows from your cable or satellite company DVR in the same manner. I do this all the time.

*This tuner uses analog broadcast and will require a converter box.

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