Philips DVDR3545V/37 DVD Recorder / VCR Combo

I bought this unit on Ebay! The many reason I bought it was to record programs from my DishNetwork DVR so that I could free up hard drive space to record more things. When I first received the unit, I was very impressed. I thought it looked relativly pretty nice. I liked the layout of the buttons on both the front panel and the remote. I read through the manual and it seamed pretty easy to use. Then I hooked it up and began to test it! The on-screen menus were layed out very nice and everything seamed pretty straight forward. I tryed playing a DVD and a VHS Tape which were both very easy. Then I tryed coping from VHS to DVD AND DVD to VHS. Again very easy. Then I set up the tuner which also was real easy and it found all my Standard Def and Digital channels. So far, I have to say I was very impressed until I hooked it to my DishNetwork DVR and tried to burn off some stuff. That's when I came up with a stupid little message saying that this program could not be copied in +VR mode. I looked in the manual and and it gave some bogus little reason! I then called Philips and talked with a Tech. I explained what I was trying to do and then he told me that error was a copy write protection error and the program couldn't be copied. I then explained that a lady I work with had just bought a Toshiba unit and it could copy just fine. He didn't seam to have much to say about that other than I would need to borrow her Toshiba then to copy those programs. Needless to say, I wasn't impressed at all! So then the experimenting came. I tryed to record a live program with the same result. I then even tried to copy something from a commerical channel and not a movie channel thinking that it would be just movies that had this copy protection. I found that even on some normal programming I would get this error. So, it would seam that it is a hit or miss on what you can record with this unit. If I had known that, I would have never purchased this unit! I would have bought the Toshiba unit instead because it seams to have no problems at all recording anying and everything. But, it's to late for me. So I guess I'll just use this unit as a player and spend more money and buy the Toshiba. I hope this may help others that are thinking of purchasing this unit for the same reason I did!

I PURCHASED THIS ITEM LAST WEEK AND IT IS VERY MISLEADING TO SET IT UP. I HAVE TRIED FOR HOURS AND CANNOT OPERATE IT CORRECTLY. THEY NEED TO MAKE A SIMPLER WAY TO HOOK IT UP. I THINK THIS IS A GREAT WAY TO RECORD YOUR OLD TAPES TO A CD.