Daewoo DF4100P Review

Overall Rating

Cheap. Excellent recording quality, even at 8 hours per disk. Very intuitive and easy to use - one touch copy of DVD to VHS or VHS to DVD.

The menu interface is great, but pressing up or down on a menu moves you from side to side, and pressing side to side moves you up and down, which is confusing until you get used to it.

I bought my Daewoo DF4100P DVD recorder a couple of months ago, and I have been extremely pleased with everything about it. I'd heard that DVD recorders are very tricky to use, but this one is a doddle. The menu system is very intuitive with the exception, that annoyingly, pressing up and down on a menu will change the selected option rather than move up or down to the next. You have to press left or right to move up or down!!!??? I still make the odd mistake by doing that. Other than that though, it is brilliant.

You can record 1, 2, 4 or 8 hours onto a standard DVD, and frankly I can't tell the difference in quality from 1 to 8. There are all the little features you'd expect to find, such as one touch record to just record what you're watching. A useful feature of that, is that if you do that you can then press the button again as many times as you like, and it will record 15 minutes for each time you press it. So, if a half hour programme comes on and you want to go to bed, you just press record three times and it will switch itself off after 30 minutes.

Possibly the best feature of all is the one-touch Video to DVD or DVD to Video function. I have several home videos that I've been trying to get transferred to DVD, but I hadn't had much luck. With this unit I just put the tape and a blank DVD in and press a button, and it does it completely automatically. Brilliant!!

When you record anything at all, the unit creates a menu with thumbnails of all the recordings with the date and time stamped next to them. The picture can be changed, as can the text on the stamp. So, I now have my 20 year old wedding video, 10 year anniversary video, and a family do this Christmas on a single DVD with a menu showing screens from each of them. All this was done completely automatically.

The unit plays Region 2 DVD's, but I'm told that if you go to the system info screen and type 1101, a region selector pops up. You can type 0 there and the unit becomes region free. I would not of course do that... ahem...

Go and buy one. It is easy to use and excellent value for money at about £150, and it plays video's.

Members' Comments ontcsr205's Review

• evan02 on 14th Nov 2008

  I have lost the instructions and can't transfer video to dvd. Can you please comment me step by step on how you do it.