Magnavox MDR515H 500GB HDD Price Review

Magnavox 500GB HDD & DVD Recorder with Digital Tuner

102 of 103 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of five stars Magnavox beats the old Toshiba, March 26, 2011
By Coffee starts my day (Indiana) See all my reviews This review is from: Magnavox MDR515H 500GB HDD and DVD R with Digital Tuner (Electronics) I have a Toshiba HDD recorder and looked for another one at ebay. After bidding on some number of of them and losing because the bids went too high I learned of the Magnavox. I first considered the 513 because it was cheaper and its 320 GB was big enough for me. Then I learned that the 515 isn’t just a bigger hard drive, but has an improved remote and saves your settings for an hour in case of a power failure, unlike the 60 seconds of the 513. Now that I have the one I like it better than my Toshiba. Toshiba has chapter mute which lets you to instantly skip commercials, that the Magnavox doesn’t, but in nearly every other way the Magnavox is more convenient to use. Besides that, I made too many mistakes watching football with the instant skip and jump too far ahead when there was no clear mute between commercial and program. If I’m recording a program with the Magnavox and want to start watching from the beginning all I have to do is press the play button and it now starts playing from the beginning. With the Toshiba I had to press time slip and reverse search to get to the beginning. This is so much simpler and no more frustrating mistakes like on occasion happened with the Toshiba. If you wanted to stop a timer recording with the Toshiba you had to get up and press stop two times on the the base unit. That prevents you from accidentally stopping a recording. Magnavox does it by pressing stop twice on the remote, much simpler. I needed my reading glasses to find the stop button on the Toshiba. You may be able to program two consecutive programs with just a two second gap; a one minute gap on the Toshiba. This also has 1.4 HDMI, which is vital in connecting to my new 3D TV. It also links to my TV, if I turn on the recorder it also turns on my TV and selects the correct input and audio source. It also has a digital tuner so I connected my old antenna to it also as my fiber optic TV. I can not good tune the picture like I could with the Toshiba, but my TV lets me change the video settings for each input and saves the settings.

I am so happy I was not able to purchase an old Toshiba at ebay. You could have to pay nearly as much for a used Toshiba (and my 1st one failed after six years) as you do for a new Magnavox. The bonus for me is that the Magnavox suits my needs much better and the black unit looks better in my setup because everything else is black.

There is a more complete review and explanation of functions at avsforum.

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64 of 65 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of five stars just a DVR with a DVD Burner, April 12, 2011
By Charles Dana “WDW” (Lake Buena Vista, FL) See all my reviews () This review is from: Magnavox MDR515H 500GB HDD and DVD R with Digital Tuner (Electronics) Tired of paying nearly $200 per month to my cable company, I decided to ditch one of my DVR’s and replace it with an HDD DVD burner with digital tuner. After all, many programs deserve to be burned to DVD and kept “forever” rather than being recorded to a hard drive on a DVR unit that will sooner or later fail or be turned in. I bought the Magnavox MDR515H from after visiting two local Best purchase stores. Neither carried any DVD burners. Bottom line, the popularity of these units is nowhere near VCR levels.

I selected this item over the less costly Magnavox MDR513H because this is a newer model and I figured Magnavox (Funai) addressed any issues they may have had with the MDR513H.

After receiving the item, I set it up, auto programmed the channels, and learned the basic features in little time. This unit works and functions great, and it is pretty easy to use particularly if you have owned a DVD burner earlier. Just, it is a DVR with a DVD burner and a 500 gigabyte hard disk drive (records up to 620 hours). In fact, the video quality is comparable to and the audio quality better than the DVR it replaced. NOTE: generally use an HDMI cable to get true video quality.

I’m happy with this unit. Unfortunately, if we (the public) do not purchase enough DVD burners, the market may continue to dwindle and we’ll squashed the best defense against high cable bills.

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28 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of five stars Great DVD recorder with hard drive, April 26, 2011
By Mark S. Detwiler See all my reviews
(REAL NAME) () This review is from: Magnavox MDR515H 500GB HDD and DVD R with Digital Tuner (Electronics) This recorder fits my needs perfectly and was exactly what I looked for. I refuse to accept the business models of Tivo or the Satellite/cable company policy of renting these devices and paying a monthly fee. You can not own them outright! The Moxi is simply too costly. I had this device hooked up in minutes and recorded to both DVD and the HDD in no time. The picture quality to HDD is excellent. It is not HD but Standard meaning (SD) but I am not using this machine to archive collectables. Just time record, watch once then erase. There are many alternatives to connecting this device based on your circumstance, i.E cable but no cable box, antennea only, satellite/cable box, etc. In my situation I simply had this unit connected to my Elite Pioneer AV receiver via the RCA audio/video input/outputs. I use an HDMI cable for playback to accomplish the upconversion to 1080p. My Cox Digital Cable box is connected to my AV receiver. Note there’s no HDMI Input. This isn’t an oversight from Magnavox. No DVD recorder or DVR device sold in the US can have an HDMI input.

To those who connect these kind of devices to AV Receivers with DTS audio decoders, note that for DVD playback this unit won’t stream DTS, if the DVD has such encoding. Not an issue for me since have a blu ray player that can do this. Most likely not an issue with most anybody who could read this but I thought I could talk about this anyway.

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