Home > Consumer Reviews > Sony RDR-VX530 DVD Recorder & VHS Combo Player

The VX530 is a neat machine and works great. It's easy to use and, so far, produces very good results. One-touch dubbing is as easy as it gets as long as nothing is copy protected. I can vouch for this one... it's a winner.
The only thing to watch out for is buying from Amazon's vendors. The one I bought was supplied by, and shipped by, J&R Electronics. The Sony box was packaged only in a plastic bag and was received in damaged condition. Since factory boxes are usually designed for sitting on store shelves and moderate protection, and not shipping cross country, sure enough the unit was also damaged.
Maybe I had a bad day, but I found J&R Electronics not the easiest people to try to return something to. Anyway, since I was under somewhat of a time constraint, I bought one from Best Buy (and got a better price as well... on sale). The new one, of course, works fine and I'm really happy with the VX530.
Bottom line... Great machine, but be a little careful who you buy from.
Since this is a review of the VX530 and not J&R, five stars for the machine... one star for poor packaging.

It seemed pretty simple: Drop in your VHS tape, put in a DVD and press the button that said VHS->DVD. 30 minutes later, the tape is done and I go to the menu to finalize the disc. After a few minutes, I get an error saying that the media is unreadable and the disc cannot be finalized. Three DVD-R/16X discs later, I gave up and searched the net. Other people had problems with it recording to DVD-R. Even though the manual says it can handle 16X, I've got new coffee table coasters that shows it doesn't. Plus the menu interface is confusing and the not intuitive.

I ordered this particular unit SPECIFICALLY because it advertised the ability to read DVD+/-DL discs. Well guess what? It can't read ANYTHING. Factory DVDs don't load. Custom burned discs don't load. Factory CD audio discs don't load. NOTHING loads. I have a $200+ piece of junk that will cost me another $10-$30 to ship back to RMA to SONY. Ordered from Etronics. Verdict is still out on them (their policy is not to take opened-item returns of SONY products). Shipping was in the regular retail box, but I thought it was suspended/packaged respectably from the factory. Bottom line: major headache. Don't take a chance ordering this online. It's not worth the hassle (especially if the damn vendor doesn't take SONY a/v returns!).

I purchased this unit on 3/7/2007 and returned it the same day. The picture quality is beautiful and it's a Sony, right? Precisely why I returned it. Multiple reviewers complained that the unit will not record from premium cable channels. But I took a chance anyway. I have Cablevision of Long Island, NY and this recorder will not allow a recording to be made from channels such as Starz, Encore, TCM and AMC...it will display a message about copyrighted material. I have a Panasonic and a Samsung dvd recorder....they do just fine on these channels. Sony is notorious for their so called piracy protection designs and if you want to record movies from cable movie channels........absolutely do not buy this recorder!!!

I've had an amazing experience with this unit. Like everyone else, we had a house full of VHS tapes.We wanted to convert our VHS collection to DVD without a computer. The conversion job seemed beyond what I could do. Despite dire warnings about combo units, we bought this one and have had no regrets. Set up was a breeze...the schematic was excellent. 75% of our VHS tapes, even the pre-recorded ones, had no copy protection and they were very easy to dub. In the 6 months it took me to transfer the entire 500 tapes, I had not one problem with the machine. We ran it night and day.

I never thought I'd use the VHS side again but it has come in handy for recording shows that are broadcast with copy protection. Things that are distorted on disc come out fine on VHS.

Now that the gargantuan task of library conversion is done, everyone I know wants to do the same at their house. I have highly recommended this unit to friends and co-workers.