A friend of mine got one of these Pioneer DVR-7000 DVD players and after seeing what it could do, I decided to take the plunge and get one to.

The £1000 price mark isn't cheap, but what you get is actually woth every penny. The recording quality of this machine is STUNNING! It has many different options for you to adjust the recording quality and includes settigs for noise reduction - which is an absolute must for people who want to transfer footage from vhs to dvd. It smoothes out the picture and gets rid of picture grain.

All the comprehensive options are presented via on-screen menus which are clear and simple to use.

Setting up the machine was a breeze, and it found all my digital channels straight away.

One of the features that really sets the 7000 above the other dvd recorder pretenders is that you can import and export footage via a DV firewire port. I found this to be great for capturing footage, and then sending it to my pc for editing. I can then send the footage back for recording onto dvd, all without any lost frames or any loss of quality.

Other connections are well catered for, with 2 scart sockets (1xRGB), S-video in/out, and 3 composite/audio connection areas. Pioneer have thoughtfully included sockets at the front of the machine too (inside a panel) to save you fumbling at the back.

The 2 DVD recording modes (there are 32 for dvd-rw) are called V1 and V2. V1 lets you record up to 60 minutes high quality footage onto a 4.7GB dvdr. V2 (standard) mode lets you record up to 2 hours worth of footage. Well, I've tried em both on a variety of footage, and to be perfectly honest, it's VERY difficult to tell the difference between the quality of the two modes. Yes, V2 recording is THAT good.

So I did spend £1000. But it was well worth it and this machine is emerging as one of the leaders in the dvd recorder field.