Samsung DVD-R135

Set-top DVD recorders have gone from being an exciting innovation to being one step less boring than VCRs, and even the addition of upscaling technology can't save them. But although it may not inspire rampant gear lust, Samsung's DVD-R135, with its ability to record to DVD coupled with the capacity to upscale DVDs to its HDMI output, promises to be a single do-it-all DVD unit. While the DVD-R135 mostly delivers on that goal, it's not quite up to the level we've seen from Panasonic recorders such as the DMR-ES25S, which offers better LP recording quality, DVD-RAM and dual-layer recording support, and a media card slot. That said, the stylish DVD-R135 will definitely look better in your A/V rack, and its superior playback compatibility might come in handy if you already have a lot of home-brew DVDs.

Design
Samsung has made another slick-looking player, taking styling cues from the Samsung BD-P1000 Blu-ray player. The top half of the DVD-R135's face is glossy black with an LED to the right of the disc tray. The bottom half is silver and inward sloping, with a few front-panel control buttons such as play, record, and handy chapter forward/backward for when the remote goes missing. There's also a flip-down panel that reveals an additional A/V input, a FireWire/IEEE-1394 DV input, and a progressive-scan button. The power button on the left has a blue light encircling it, although home theatre enthusiasts might be disappointed that it can't be dimmed. However, we think most people will find the design a notch above the competition.

The remote is thoughtfully designed, with enough differentiation between the buttons to make it easy to navigate by feel. The recording functions are clearly labeled and offset so that you won't hit one by accident. The only function we felt was missing from the remote was a button to easily change the output resolution; you have to go into the menus to change that. On the other hand, most people will probably set it once and never need it again.

While the menus and interface aren't very fancy, we found them easy to use. While we preferred Panasonic's menu style from a visual standpoint, Samsung's menus move faster and provide more information at a glance.

Features
For DVD recording, the Samsung DVD-R135 offers four recording modes that all have trade-offs in recording quality vs. capacity. Only one hour of highest-quality XP-mode video fits onto one single-layer DVD; SP is two hours, LP is four, and EP is either six or eight. Unlike many other players, there is no support for dual-layer discs, which offer twice the recording capacity of standard recordable DVDs. That's a big missing feature in our book. While the unit accepts write-once DVD-R and rewriteable DVD-RW blank media, there's also no support for recording to DVD-RAM discs, which is a feature we've seen on Panasonic DVD recorders. On those recorders, DVD-RAM discs offer limited DVR-like functionality, such as the ability to pause the playback of a recording while the program continues to record.

There's no aspect-ratio control on the DVD-R135, which is a feature we really liked on Samsung's nonrecording DVD-HD960. The lack of aspect-ratio control is an issue with nonanamorphic wide-screen DVDs, which don't completely fill the screen. Because some HDTVs do not have aspect-ratio control on HD inputs, it's always nice to also have the control on the DVD player. That said, it's not a common feature on other DVD-recorders we've seen.

On the upside, the DVD-R135 has one of our favourite features: flexible recording. Selecting this option allows you to completely fill a DVD with your program, maximising the video quality. Because the recorder needs to "know" how long the program will be to optimise the quality setting, flexible recording is available only for timer recordings -- which is a standard shortcoming of DVD recorders without a hard drive. This isn't a problem for fixed-length programs such as movies, but you might want to pad it on something like a football game that can run long. Another feature we liked was commercial skip, which is conveniently adjustable to 15, 30, or 60 seconds so that you can blast through ads.

The DVD-R135's connectivity is highlighted by its HDMI output, which is capable of upscaling to 480p, 720p, and 1080i resolutions. While almost all recent HDTVs can do this upconversion on their own, it's possible that the picture quality can benefit if the upscaling processing in the DVD player is superior to the processing in your TV. This increase in image quality is very dependent on the display used, so it's worthwhile to try one of these units on your TV before buying if you're expecting big results. The rest of the connectivity suite is made up of two A/V inputs (one with S-Video), two A/V outputs (one with S-Video), a component video output, an antenna input/output, and two digital audio inputs (one optical, one coaxial). Around the front is also a DV input for easy hookup to a camcorder.

Performance
Recording quality was good on the Samsung DVD-R135, although not quite up to the level of the excellent Panasonic DMR-ES25S. The unit has four recording-quality modes: XP, SP, LP, and EP. XP and SP offer the best quality, and the difference between them is slight. On the other hand, LP mode suffers a significant loss in resolution, and we'd recommend against using it for anything where image quality matters, such as movies. This is the area where the Panasonic DMR-ES25S has the largest advantage; its LP mode is almost as good as its SP mode, which means you can double the amount of content that can fit on a DVD with relatively small loss in video resolution. It's an even bigger issue considering that the DVD-R135 can't handle dual-layer media. Watching actual program material in the various modes echoed what we saw in resolution patterns. Recorded scenes from Aeon Flux, for example, looked sharp in XP and SP mode, but compression artifacts and jaggies in LP and EP mode seriously distracted from the viewing experience.

Video playback performance was a little above average, but a full notch below the best players we've seen. For example, the resolution pattern from Silicon Optix's HQV test suite revealed that it could pass full DVD resolution, but we noticed that some parts of the image were flickering and not stable. While it passed tests with three shifting lines and a rotating line, an image detail test revealed some strange jaggies in marble steps that would follow cars as they drive by. Switching over to the Windows DVD Test Annex, we also noticed that the DVD-R135 sometimes suffered from the chroma bug error, which resulted in very noticeable jaggies on moving animated fish. We should note, however, that this error would be noticeable only on improperly authored DVDs. Switching over to actual program material was better, but not perfect. We watched a few scenes from Serenity, and for the most part it looked sharp. However, we did feel that it looked significantly noisier than other upconverting DVD players we've looked at.

Disc compatibility was solid overall. It was able to playback all types of recorded DVDs, including DVD-RAM and DVDs with MP3s on them. This is in contrast to the disc compatibility problems we've continued to have on Panasonic recorders. If you have a large library of burned DVDs from another recorder, you might want to steer toward the DVD-R135 to be safe.

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