CUSTOM INSTALLATION HOW-TO

Samsung Two decks in one, almost

The Short Form

$450 / 17 x 3.125 x 13.33 IN / samsung.com / 800-726-7864

Plus

•Simple disc dubbing. •Easy manual commercial removal.

Minus

•Disc-to-disc dubbing limited to unprotected discs. •No chapter markers in recordings on erasable discs.

Key Features

•Dual-tray design to simplify disc copying •Full playlist editing for more complex productions •Records on DVD-R/RW and DVD-RAM discs

Test Bench

Recording quality was typical of most DVD recorders I've tested when compared mode by mode. Playback performance through the progressive-component output was a little below average, with jaggies on diagonal edges and a rolled-off luminance response. Click here for full lab results

Samsung's DVD-TR520 takes a concept familiar from VCR days and gives it an optical-disc twist - it's a dual-tray deck that can copy directly from one DVD to another. Like some dual-tray CD recorders we've seen, there's a play-only tray on the right and a recorder tray on the left. This tandem hookup can make DVD copies at high speed.

DISC DUBBING Now don't get any big ideas - this deck won't dub a copy-protected DVD, whether it's sitting in the player drawer or fed in from another player. Even if the disc you want to dub isn't copy-protected, it also has to be a single-layer disc. But if a disc you want to copy meets these criteria - like some music and special-interest titles, for instance - you can use the DVD-TR520's Disc-Copy function to make a bit-perfect clone of the entire disc in a matter of minutes. I dubbed Jodeci's Back to the Future: The Videos onto an 8x DVD-R in about 15 minutes, and the clone retained all the features of the original, including menus, extras, and Dolby Digital and DTS soundtracks.

The dual-tray design is best used to make quick copies of your home-grown titles, including DVDs produced on the DVD-TR520 itself. So Samsung also includes a Title-Selection menu that lets you choose, for example, just one or two individual home movies for copying from a disc holding several. You can also change the recording mode during a real-time (not high-speed) dub to maximize playing time on the copy. The Title-Selection system works only with home-recorded discs, however - neither commercial discs nor their clones can be dubbed this way.

REMOVING COMMERCIALS As with all DVD recorders, the DVD-TR520's editing capabilities are most versatile when you use an erasable disc - in this case, DVD-RAM and DVD-RW (in VR mode, as opposed to the more widely playable Video mode). Both formats are treated identically by the deck - it doesn't offer any of the DVR-like simultaneous record/playback features found on other DVD-RAM recorders.

Deleting commercials was reasonably easy with both disc types using the Partial-Delete function. With it you can use the deck's cueing controls to mark the beginning and end points of a commercial segment, which is then deleted using another menu button. But unlike similar systems with other recorders, Samsung's leaves no residual chapter markers where the commercials were removed. After spending considerable time removing the commercials from a TV movie, you end up with a single long title that has no chapter divisions to help you cue up the portion you want.

You can, however, get the DVD-TR520 to automatically insert regularly spaced chapter marks on unerasable DVD-R discs, or on DVD-RWs in the Video recording mode. But you'll probably find the markers are much too widely spaced - 15 minutes apart - if you record in the high-capacity LP or EP modes.

The recorder does have full playlist editing for DVD-RAM and DVD-RW (VR) recordings so you can reorder program segments via a list of segment start/stop points that the player rapidly cues to. But as usual with playlist editing on standalone DVD recorders, the system is tedious to operate and far less versatile than even the most basic computer editing systems.

BOTTOM LINE Although its recording quality was fine (see "test bench"), many people won't have use for the Samsung's dual-tray design, and a deck with a hard drive would be a better choice at this price. But if you have a big library of home-brew DVDs to dub, the DVD-TR520 offers a unique solution.