Sony RDR-HX510: Dual-layer cake

By on 25 October 2005, 11:13am

Looks like you'll need to ditch that DVD recorder you just bought -- Sony has sneaked out a dual-layer recording gem. If you wanted to fit a 2-hour movie on a single layer DVD, you needed to drop the quality for it to fit. But because DVD+R 'DL' discs have an 8.5GB capacity, you can finally record all your movies off the TV at DVD-quality, instead of going out and buying them. Take that, capitalist movie studios!

The great thing about the Sony is that you can record everything to the 80GB hard drive in the highest quality before archiving to DVD -- so when the programme has finished you can edit out all the adverts. Even better, the super-intelligent machine sets up chapter breaks when it thinks there's adverts, so it takes about two minutes to go back and edit it into uninterrupted perfection. It's so clever that we couldn't even fool it with a super-fast-cut music-video channel.

The economics of dual-layer recording don't quite add up (dual layer offers double the capacity of single layer, but it costs ten times as much), but we're so excited about it that we may never buy another film on DVD. The RDR-HX510 could do with a bigger hard drive and a Freeview tuner to enter our Editors' Top Ten, but we won't keep you hanging about -- read the full review later this week. -GC

Update: a full review of the Sony RDR-HX510 is now live.