Spiritual
I had hoped that DVD+R/RW would be nirvana for a video-recording maven like me, and in many ways it is. Of all the recordable DVD formats out there, DVD+RW is clearly the best choice as a direct replacement for the venerable VCR: You simply pop a disc into the unit, record what you want, take it out, and play it in almost any conventional DVD player. You can then record more material and erase anything on the disc to recover the space it took up. In fact, I see no significant reason for using DVD+R at all.

Like all disc formats, DVD+R/RW is completely random-access, which means you don't have to rewind or fast-forward to get to the spot you want. And the editing capabilities are better than DVD-RW's (Video mode). Even more important, DVD+R/RW is not limited to recording in 30-second chunks. With DVD-R or DVD-RW (Video mode), for example, if you hit the Stop button after 5 minutes and 1 second of recording, the unit continues to record for another 29 seconds.

I haven't discussed DVD-RAM here, but will review Panasonic's latest DVD-RAM recorder in an upcoming issue. Suffice it to say for now that DVD-RAM is incompatible with standard DVD players and so does not provide complete VCR functionality.

However, the DVDR985 fell short in several areas, particularly its user interface, which I found nonintuitive in many respects. In addition to points made elsewhere in this review, I have a few more gripes. For example, if you pause playback and scan slowly in one direction, then hit the scan button in the opposite direction, it switches to fast scanning. This is all the more frustrating because there is no jog/shuttle control to precisely cue thumbnail images, chapter markers, A-B repeat points, and record-insert points.

Among the other items on my wish list for the '985 is a commercial-skip button and an input-select button on the remote. Perhaps most important, I wish it had manual picture controls, especially for archiving poor-quality tapes. I understand that Philips wanted to make this recorder as easy and automatic as possible for the average person, but including manual controls wouldn't necessarily have hindered that goal. Fortunately, most of the things I wish for can be implemented in software (except the physical buttons, of course); I hope that Philips includes them in a future software release.

Fortunately, the cost of recorders and media is coming down fast. The DVDR985 costs less than $1000, and I've seen DVD+R and DVD+RW blanks in bulk on the Web for as low as $3 and $4.50 each, respectively. Granted, VCRs are generally under $200 and blank VHS tapes are around $2 each, but the benefits of DVD recording are far greater than anything videotape can offer. Are those benefits worth the extra money it costs to record on DVD? If you can afford it, I'd say the answer is a definite yes; and as prices continue to fall and new features are added, the cost/benefit ratio will only improve.

Overall, I liked the Philips DVDR985 very much. Despite its quirks, it offers a true replacement for the VCR (that is, once they fix the timer-recording problems), and its firmware can be easily updated via CD-ROM (which allows them to fix those timer problems in the field). When the last remaining bugs have been ironed out, the DVDR985 will be a fine replacement for your old, tired VCR.