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I presently only use the unit with component video cables. Support from Philips no longer offers software upgrades for this model that I could find.
[.].[.]. Can't believe with no changes/upgrades to the unit the price has more than doubled for no reason.
A real pity.What really surprises me, coming back to see these reviews, is that I purchased my DVR from Wal-Mart for around $300 at the time. The Philips site does offer software updates.
I have had my Philips DVDR3575 DVR for nearly two years, and my only complaint is the HDMI upscale quality is poor, as others have noted. It is basically an upscale VCR with faster search features and much greater storage capability.
Update 6/18/09I should have done more research before speaking out.
So I keep the unit powered off to standby normally. If you want to record TV programs, you must put the cable in to the DVD recorder before the TV, so I was really disappointed. The TV also found pay-per-view movies that apparently my neighbors were watching. I have a Panasonic TH-42PX77U 42" 720p Plasma HDTV, which has a beautiful picture for standard and HD TV programs coming through the cable input.I was disappointed to see that when I plugged the cable in to the Philips DVD recorder unit, and then used HDMI cables to connect from the unit to the TV, the picture degraded significantly for both standard and HD programming.
If I could have done it again, I would not have spent so much money, and I would have gotten a unit which didn't try to do anything fancy to the cable signal on the way to the TV.I don't know why the upconverting makes the picture worse.It may be that if the TV already has algorithms to make the picture look good for standard and HD TV programming, then these upconverting DVD units, by averaging, adding, and reweighting pixels to smooth out discontinuities, end up actually distorting the picture that the HD TV already has been tuned to fix much better.Hope this helps. When I am recording to the DVD unit, I use the input from the cable directly to the DVD unit to capture the cable signal. Since I am one of those people who stick to my decisions, the solution I came up with was this :1) Buy a T-junction cable splitter from Home Depot and a couple short cables2) Plug one cable directly into the TV3) Plug one cable into the DVD unit4) Plug HDMI from DVD unit to TVWhen I am doing normal TV watching, I use the direct input from the cable to the TV, meaning I get a good quality picture, and all the hidden channels. If you have a Panasonic HD TV like me, that goes double.More :I will mention a few things here :* picture quality from DVDs* picture quality from cable tv programming* tuner's ability to find channels* a solution to poor picture from the unit on a good HD TVThis unit produces a well enough picture for upconverting DVDs. One issue I see is that the unit consumes a lot of power when it is powered on (you can tell by how hot it gets when it isn't supposed to be doing anything). Now the real test for me was the picture quality of the TV programs. Also, I found that the tuner on the DVD unit did not find as many channels as the Panasonic TV The Panasonic TV tuner was able to find digital channels that I had no idea existed and was not even sure I was paying for them.
This is not so convenient, and it also means that my recorded programs are lower quality than live ones which I view with the TV, but at least I'm not out $250 bucks. Executive summary : I would not consider this unit if your HD TV already provides a good picture of HD and standard TV viewing. In fact, even if you put the unit in standby, you can hear it regularly switch some sort of motor on occasionally for a few minutes. The DVD unit found none of the extra channels.
If you want to know everything about this recorder, go here: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php.t=940657This site is great for the inside scoop on this unit. I'm waiting on a composite video cable to see if it's better. For a non-HD recorder, the image quality is great. I've had this recorder about a week now, and it's pretty good. My one complaint would be that the images from the HHD and commercial movies have too much black in them when using an HDMI cable. In general, I am happy with this unit.
It's not without its' quirks but it does the job and copies recordings from the hard drive to the DVD very quickly when it's set up correctly. I've had the Philips 3575H/37 for about 8 months and found it to be a very capable recorder. Recently I hooked the Philips box up through an old Slingbox and can now program and watch the DVDR timer recordings as well as live TV over the internet with SlingPlayer software on my laptop or WMPC.
Don't get caught up with being picky over options when there is not a lot out there to choose from in the first place. Recording is reliable, and I love that you can tell it to record for x amount of time and then auto-power off.There is a model right above this one that costs 100 bucks more, but I checked the specs on them both and called Philips to confirm: They are the same exact thing besides the price difference and the physical color of the item. The best. It does just that. Hello.
I wanted something that could record from cable TV to a hard drive and then spit it out on DVDs. The editing is enough for any normal person. This is the best deal you will find concerning DVR with a built-in hard drive. Awesome deal :).As far as performance, the picture on upscaled dvds looks great on my 40inch 1080p Samsung LCD. This is coming from a non-enthusiast.
With the sweet hard drive size that you can't find elsewhere, this was a great deal. Not to mention upscaling DVD player.
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