Home > Consumer Reviews > Sharp DV-HR300U DVD Player/Recorder with 80-GB Drive

After searching near and far to replace my Panasonic showstopper 2000 (problems with over heating hard drive) I came across an article in Sound and Vision that reviewed the Sharp DV-HR300U. They gave a very good review of the Sharp and I completely agree with there assessment. The actual recording on the hard drive looks 10x better then the my old Panasonic.
There were only a few quirky things to get used to. One was that fact that this DVR does not have a menu like Tivo or Replay. You will get a grid very similar to the Tivo and Replay but there is no listing of the shows. For me personally it took a little getting used to, kind of had withdrawals. But, once I got past it I was just fine. The Sharp DV-HR300U comes with its own tuner so you can watch your own TV and record on separate channel. BUT **BIG BUT* if you have cable as I do and your premium channels are 99 and higher then you need to get a little creative. I had to keep in mind that Sharp made the DV-HR300U more like a VCR then a PVR. So on my cable box I used the component out for the component in on the Sharp DV-HR300U and record directly off the cable box. I leave the Sharp DV-HR300U on channel three and my cable box on the channel that it needs to record. Sounds like a pain in the but.. HUH! Well I would agree with you. and I was ready to return it, until I discovered that my cable box has a channel timer. Now I simply set the cable box to switch to the channels I want, at the time I want and set the Sharp DV-HR300U to record at that time and I have my personal clone of Tivo/ Replay type of user friendly menu.
Like I said if it were not for the fact that my cable box would switch channels for me I would not have kept it. And that would have been a real shame, because this thing puts out some awesome pictures. I also like the fact that I am not paying Tivo and Replay the $200.00 life time or $14.99 monthly service to record. It's a give and take. =)
One last thing to review is the dvd recording. Simply put its looks great. Don't expect some of the older dvd players to be able to play the DVD-R or RW. I nor any of my family or friends had to worry about it because we had dvd players that were fairly new and played the whatever I had recorded. The software is bit technical but once you understand it you will have no problems. I have even uploaded home movies that I recorded on my sony digital camcorder. It's a nice touch to be able to put those home made movies on dvd..
I hope this review helped and with these parting words I recommend it highly as long you can meet the same needs that I had. good luck ....

I posted a favorable review of this unit about 6 months ago. Granted there were some catches, but one day the DVD recorder just stopped working for me. 20 DVD-Rs later, Sharp had me ship the unit to them (at my expense). One month later, the unit was returned to me and SURPRISE! the DVD Recorder still doesn't work for me. Livid, I call back saying that this time the shipping is on them. They agreed and it was returned to them using their Fed Ex account. Two months go by and I don't hear anything and finally, the unit arrives back at my doorstep in a box that's 50X larger than the unit (way to save on materials, guys!). SURPRISE! the unit still doesn't work. I returned it once again, sure that they would just replace the old unit with a new one. Apparently, not surprisingly, they stopped making this piece of garbage and agreed to reimburse me for the cost of my unit. That was two months ago and still no check and every time I try to get someone on the phone over at Sharp, they either don't have answers for me or I get disconnected.

My advice... avoid Sharp products at all costs - they clearly don't have the resources to take care of their customers and I'm out $300.

First off, don't take this as a reason NOT to buy this unit. The player/recorder worked great right out of the box. It records great to -RW and -R discs and to the hard drive.

The dubbing feature from the HD to the DVD burner is a little slow (it's actually 1x mode) unless you activate highspeed dubbing, but has a neat timing feature where you can schedule a dub from HD to DVD in the future. I pop the DVD in when I go to bed and it's ready to pop into a stand alone DVD player when I wake up. I was so happy to see that the DVD-R played in my 6 year old Sony DVPS-550S player!!!

My biggest beef is the lack of editing support. You can edit scenes, add chapters, and move things around but the menu is clunky and it take for ever to change the name of a title with the remote control. I now burn to DVD -RW, finalize the disc, and dump it onto my PC for advanced editing and then reburn to -R disc. I was debating on whether I needed a HD unit or not. A HD makes it a lot easier to use the unit as a VCR, which I have started to do.

Overall, VERY satisfied with this unit. I was lucky to get it on Amazon for 379!!!

I got this recorder about a week ago. I was originally thinking about Panasonic, but didn't want to have to buy the top of the line or last year's model to get the ilink for dubbing from my camcorder. Was a bit concerned since Sharp wasn't such a well known brand to me, but so far so good and this deck is a great deal. Haven't had any major problems, one DVD-RW failed to initialize, but others are working okay. I have noticed you can't interrupt the deck and try to do something else during initialization/finalization. Manual is very complicated (and I am an EE), BUT, I'd have to say I don't see how it could be simple considering all of the functions. Overall, I'd recommend it (especially at the $379 price I got it for including shipping and no tax!)

Few other things...I was also successfully able to use 4x discs (see the next reviewers comments), have not seen the flicker problem another reviewer mentioned, and also the black level seems to be fine (Toshiba bug)

After using this unit for a month the hard drive just quit recording!
I had it sent in 3 times to Sharp Repair , every single time came back in the same state it was beforet(unrepaired) but with a note from Sharp Tech Dept that nothing is wrong with the unit!
Only after filing a complaint with Better Business Bureau they decided to refund me the money I paid for the unit because THE UNIT CANNOT BE REPAIRED!
A Class Action Lawsuit should be filed against them because I think they knew that something is wrong with the design of this particular model but they still do not want to admit it!