Sony RDR-HXD560 DVD/Hard Disk Drive Recorder

Introduction

The RDR-HXD560 is a DVD Recorder with Hard Drive from Sony. With its 80gb hard drive, Sony tells us that it can store up to 106 hours of programmes recorded either from the built-in Freeview digital TV tuner, or pulled in from other devices connected over its video inputs. This "106 hours" figure is of course relating to the lowest possible recording quality, and if you want to use the highest quality mode, expect to store a still very reasonable 8 hours on the drive. Similarly, you can make recordings straight to DVD, and of course, offload programmes from the hard drive to recordable discs should you ever be running low on space or want to send recordings to a friend.

Setting the unit up was easy enough, with one small exception. After making all of the connections, I turned it on and set my TV to the appropriate input. And - nothing. The problem here is that I'd connected using Component Video, and that particular output mode isn't enabled by default. Luckily, I had a standard Composite video cable lying around, so I managed to complete enough of the first-time "Easy Setup" wizard to enable the Component output. Make sure that doesn't catch you out if you want a hassle-free install.

Once the "Easy Wizard" had completed, I was shown a rather anticlimactic grey screen. Keying in channel numbers soon got the unit behaving in the way I'd expected it to, and let me watch digital TV (Freeview). Another quick trip into the "System Menu" let me enable Progressive Scan mode, which is Component Video's main advantage over the RGB SCART connection method. Enabling Progressive mode - that is, having the recorder's picture processing circuitry perform the task of Deinterlacing, rather than assigning the duty to the processing in the TV - made almost no difference to the picture quality of TV channels. To be fair, this is probably because most digital TV channels look like overcompressed mush on any equipment, so the RDR-HXD560 is not to blame. Since most TVs in Europe only have a measly one Component video input, I don't recommend using it up on the RDR-HXD560 - RGB SCART will do just fine, unless you plan on using it as your main player as well.


Pressing the EPG button on the remote control brought up, unsurprisingly, the Electronic Programme Guide. If you've ever used one of the new BRAVIA TVs, then you'll know what to expect here - the guide that appears is styled in the the almost identical blue and yellow layout, only of course, it now supports the additional Recording functions.

Making a Recording

Before I review the playback facilities of this machine, I'm going to discuss what most people will undoubtedly be buying it for - the recording functionality.

Prior to starting recordings, you should choose what level of quality you want from the end result. The RDR-HXD560 has no less than nine different settings, ranging from HQ+ (which uses a bit rate of around 16mbps, higher than is allowed on DVD), to SLP, which is nearer to the "MPEG soup" end of the quality spectrum. I'd appreciate it if Sony had numbered these from 1 to 9, or given some better indication of the quality. Most people will be able to tell that "HQ+" is the best quality setting, but acronyms like LSP and ESP could be better described to avoid confusion.


Recording can be accomplished in one of two ways. You can either find a programme that's currently showing and choose to record it there and then by simply pressing the Record button, or navigate around the EPG and find programmes showing in the near future (you can see listings for the next 8 days) that you want to schedule. Although the EPG is slow to navigate around, it does the trick pretty nicely and it's a far cry away from keying in start/stop times and VideoPlus codes.

Recording directly to disc works in the same way. Using buttons on the front of the unit, or on the remote control, you can set where you want your recordings to end up - HDD or DVD. The front panel has these indicated by nifty purple and orange lit buttons.


Whilst scheduling recordings, I came across a strange error. After moving around the EPG and scheduling some programmes, I then went back to another channel and attempted to record what was currently showing - only to be greeted by the message "Cannot set the timer to record more than a total of 8 hours". I could, however, manually jump to the channel and begin the recording myself. I found this a little strange, but it's not a huge deal.



Once you've stored up a nice catalogue of programmes, pressing "TITLE LIST" on the remote will let you see what's recorded on either the currently inserted DVD or the internal hard drive. By default, the view is a fairly claustrophobic 3-per-screen list, but by pressing the "Options" button you can change this to a more sensible nine by selecting the "Display List" option. Fortunately, the unit remembers which setting you prefer, so you only need to do this once. For the hard drive, a handy "NEW" indicator indicates programmes you've recorded and not yet watched, which I found very useful. From this same menu, you can also Erase programmes, "Protect" them from accidental erasure, rename them, split them into parts, and, when you have a recordable disc inserted, the "Dubbing" option will let you offload progammes from the hard drive to a recordable DVD disc. There's also a feature named "A-B Erase", which lets you cut parts of recordings out (adverts, for example).



Shifting programmes from the hard drive to a separate disc is a pretty painless process. You simply choose the "Dubbing" option, where you're given the opportunity to further compress the programme just in case you want to fit it onto a disc more easily (at the expense of quality, of course). If you've recorded to the hard drive using the "HQ+" option, you'll be required to downsize a little, because the HQ+ function actually uses a bit rate of 16mbps - which is higher than DVD allows. (For this reason, you need to delve into the system menu to enable the HQ+ mode). While this "Dubbing" operation is going on, you can continue watching TV, but you can't make new recordings to the hard drive.

If you've used a recording quality mode that will fit comfortably onto a DVD, you can choose the "Fast Dub" mode which I'd assume avoids any additional recompression.

Playing back the recordings I'd made to the drive, I was pleasantly surprised at the picture quality. Sony gives us a host of video filter options - FNR (Frame Noise Reduction), Block Noise Reduction, Mosquito Noise Reduction, and of course, the evil Sharpness filter. I left all of these filters off.

I did, however, find one slight annoyance that isn't so much a problem with the recorder itself, but mostly the fault of the broadcasters. While we're sadly used to having annoying on-screen channel logos broadcast as part of the video itself, BBC take it upon themselves to add incredibly annoying "Press Red" graphics in the top-right of the screen (one of the BBC children's channels uses one that's a ridiculous size). These graphics are overlaid onto the video at receiving end - they aren't part of the original broadcast. That means that it should be possible to ignore them and not record them onto the stored video, but sadly the RDR-HXD560 doesn't offer that facility. I'd certainly appreciate the option to turn these annoyances off when recording, especially when you consider that the said overlaid graphics refer to "Interactive" services which won't function on the recorded programme anyway! Some Freeview set top boxes allow you to disable them for simply watching TV, and it's a pity this recorder doesn't do the same for its recordings.

Although the quality of the recordings is nothing to be sniffed at - I analysed a burned disc in a computer and was very pleased with the results - I can't understand why the unit recompresses recorded video. If these overlaid logos appear on the recordings, that, then, means that the RDR-HXD560 is bringing programmes in from the aerial through its digital tuner, converting them to a video signal, then reconverting them back to stored data via its MPEG encoder and writing the results to disc. Surely directly storing the MPEG-2 programmes pulled straight from the aerial would be the more direct and sensible option? This would mean that the already ropey-looking Freeview broadcasts would not be degraded further by recompression, and that optimal use of the hard drive would be made. Ignoring this though, the quality of the videos on the highest setting is, as I said, as good as the source material allows. I should also add that this appears to be the standard for DVD recorders and is unavoidable.

However, this recording method does have something that could be an advantage for deaf or hard of hearing users. Because the RDR-HXD560 records exactly what you see on screen onto disc, that also means that if you have Subtitles turned on, then the recording will have these burned into the video.


In addition to recording programmes from the built-in digital tuner, the RDR-HXD560 can also record certain types of video from its dedicated inputs. The front panel flips down to reveal a Composite/S-Video pair for connecting an analogue camcorder or VCR, as well as an I.link DV Input for connecting a digital camcorder to. The back of the recorder lets you input Composite, S-Video, or RGB, via a SCART socket (you must tell the machine what sort of video is being fed in in the system menu). Supporting RGB quality input means that you'll be able to record from an external Satellite or Cable decoder with only minimal quality loss. I was disappointed to see however, that the device refused to record anything except 50hz video, so don't buy this unit with the intention of converting your Uncle Chuck's home videos from America to DVD. Similarly, don't expect to use the machine to record and show off your video gaming skills (since games are best experienced at 60hz). I doubt that this will upset too many people, but I was disappointed nonetheless since my Philips DVD recorder from 2003 doesn't have this limitation. Equipment should be multi-standard in this day and age.

Sony also claims that this unit has a "Series Recording" function - a Sky+/Tivo style feature which lets you simply tell the machine to record your favourite programmes every time they're shown. It's bad news for whoever designed the interface and manual then, that I couldn't find out exactly how I was supposed to activate this function. Every time I tried to select it in the EPG, it was simply greyed out with no explanation as to why.

Pausing Live TV and "Chase Playback"

Sony advertises one of the features of the RDR-HXD560 as allowing you to pause Live TV - great for if the phone rings, for example. How is such a feat accomplished? By recording to the hard disk in the background and then playing back, of course. Simply pressing the Pause button on the remote control begins the Pause TV mode. This is all well and good, but it seems that resuming TV isn't always as simple. Trying to unpause before approximately two minutes or so have elapsed will show the error "Cannot cancel TV pause at this time. Please wait". Make sure it's not a short phone call, or you'll be waiting for the machine to catch up.

Speaking of catching up, the recorder also features "Chase Playback". That simply means that you can watch the beginning of a recording while it's still in progress, with more being added on to the end of it.

Image Quality

Although the recorded discs could produce very good results, I wasn't always very pleased with the video output quality of the RDR-HXD560 itself when viewing TV shows. Connected via Component video using Progressive Scan, I noticed that any red or pink areas of the screen had a noticeable amount of electronic video noise that wasn't present in the source itself (and wasn't present when I watched the same channels directly on my TV). It was easily noticeable on the BBC News 24 on-screen logo and news ticker and reminded me of a less severe form of the chroma noise pattern I used to see on old LaserDiscs! Needless to say, it's a little surprising to see it here. The problem doesn't seem to extend to DVD playback however, and would seem to indicate a quirk with the way the digital tuner's output is rigged up internally. The same problem was visible over the RGB SCART connection.

DVD Playback

The unit I received for review was locked to Region 2 only, which is obviously something you should avoid if you plan on using it as a serious DVD player. This meant that I had to forego my usual test discs for ones that I was "permitted" to watch.

The R2 material I chose to demo included a PAL film with a perfect DVD transfer ("The Incredibles") and a PAL TV show originally recorded on high-quality DigiBeta ("Brass Eye"), and I was able to look at what sort of job the RDR-HXD560 was doing at Progressive Scan DVD playback. The results in the case of the TV show (recorded using a video camera) were very good, with close to no deinterlacing artefacts such as combing or jumping lines at all. However, the results for film material - which, if treated properly, should be pixel perfect in terms of motion - were only "above average". "The Incredibles" occasionally broke into jagged interlacing patterns on movement. Fortunately, this was pretty rare, but seeing as Progressive Scan DVD players that entirely avoid such issues are out there, it's hard to go back to.

For DVD playback, this player is free of the Chroma Upsampling Error (meaning that the edges of colours don't appear jagged). It also DOES pass Blacker Than Black video, which simply means that dark areas will not lose detail. I had to turn the Contrast on the player's video controls up to achieve this, however.

Closing Thoughts

I'm sure that, compared to the competition, the RDR-HXD560 is a really agreeable performer. For me to rave about it, though, I'd need things to be made just a little more responsive and user friendly. The time the unit takes to respond is a little slow which can be irritating when scrolling through the Programme Guide, and while it does the job of recording TV shows from its built-in tuner very nicely, both the interface and the "noisy reds" would seem to indicate things being a tiny bit rough around the edges.

A pretty good way to sum it up is this: if you must record digital TV programmes to disc, then this will certainly do the job for you. If, on the other hand, you're looking to buy your grandfather a modern replacement for his VCR, perhaps wait a while. There are some things - like recording a series - that don't work quite as I expected on this unit. Also if you notice video flaws easily, then don't expect it to replace your dedicated DVD player either.