Custom Installation How-To

While I was working on this review, my friend Rob - a filmmaker who has a day job as a video editor at MTV - asked if I could recommend a DVD recorder to help him get rid of his bulky collection of VHS tapes. In true New York style, I started my reply with, "Have I got a deal for you . . .

Ever since "universal" DVD players first appeared, I've waited patiently for prices to come down and for the flood of Super Audio CD and DVD-Audio titles initially promised to arrive. Well, the flood never came - I've got Yes's Fragile on DVD-Audio and Miles Davis's Kind of Blue on SACD, but I'm still waiting on the Beatles' Sgt.

Yamaha's remarkably trim DVD-S1500 manages to go beyond most other "universal" players. Of course it plays DVD movies plus DVD-Audio and Super Audio CD music discs, most varie-ties of recordable DVDs, and CDs with standard audio, MP3 files, or JPEG-format still images. But it also plays DVDs in the European PAL format on a U.S.-standard TV.

Many video enthusiasts, al though they may have long wanted to destroy their cantankerous, tape-eating, low-resolution VHS machines, have collected large libraries of off-air programs or camcorder footage that they wouldn't want to be without. What better way to preserve your VHS library than to copy it to a far more robust and easy-to-use medium like recordable DVD?

For a lot of reasons, a DVD recorder equipped with a hard-disk drive makes a lot of sense. Sharp's stylish DV-HR300, which contains a drive with an 80-gigabyte (GB) capacity, is a good example of the advantages of such an arrangement.