Home > Consumer Reviews > Sony RDR-VX535 DVD Recorder & VCR Combo Player with 1080p HDMI Upscaling and Bonus HDMI Cable

I purchased this recorder to archive my old VHS tapes and recommended by Sony. I have been able to make DVD's from material stored in the cable box; very easy. The problem I have is that it won't copy my old VHS tapes to DVD; it claims they are copy protected. These are not movies or purchased tapes that might be copy protected. They are a mixture of items saved from TV broadcasts, files transferred from VHS recorders, and some tapes that came with merchandise.

I have called Sony and they said there is no work around. They say that if the recorder thinks they are copy protected, then it won't copy them. They said there is nothing they cando and nothing I can do about it.

I owned a Panasonic VHS/DVD recorder for nearly two years with very few problems. The upscaling of VHS and standard DVD's was ok with the HDMI cable and some standard def dvd's looked a little jaggy, but overall, it played DVD's/ VHS tapes fine.
However, recording from VHS to DVD - what a nightmare!! First, when I inserted a DVD -R , the machine froze and it took several hours to finally remove the DVD; after that, it wouldn't play ANY dvd's - previously recorded, commercial, anything. After several hours with customer support, I gave up. It would only play VHS tapes - what an expensive VHs player this turned into!
So I saw Costco was selling this Sony that pretty much had the same features, but I especially wanted to be able to convert a bunch of old vhs tapes to dvd.
This Sony worked flawlessly from the beginning, and I was well on my way to converting nearly 60 old vhs tapes to dvd. No problems whatsoever with different DVD types- DVD(+-)(RW) were accepted . It won't record to DVD -RAM, but will play them. The upscaling feature on this Sony is also much better than the Panny, and so far it works great.
However, since it doesn't have a tuner built in, you'll need a connection to your cable/satellite box to record TV shows, but that doesn't matter to me at all since I'm not interested in taping TV.
Overall, I'm satisified.

I needed a DVD player for my second TV. I really love my Oppo DVD player and was thinking of getting another for my second TV, but I saw the Sony RDR-VX535 Player at Costco and looked at the features and decided to try it out.

It took less than 5 minutes to set it up and figure out how to copy tapes to DVDs, the main reason I got the Sony instead of another Oppo. It does a great job copying and with the up scaling feature the visual quality of the dvd copied from the tape is better that the visual quality of the tape itself. I don't think the up scaling or video quality is a good as my Oppo but it's pretty good and the versatility and ease of use make it a good buy.

Have had my unit for a few weeks not and it has exceeded all of my expectations. I'm a Sony fan anyway, and this is just more affirmation for me. This was the only such combo player I could find at an affordable price - apparently they aren't offered by most other companies.

We purchased this unit from Costco and returned it two days later. The unit pauses intermittently and sometimes freezes altogether while playing DVD's. Never got a chance to try the recording features, but if the thing won't play DVD's who cares. Sounds like a number of others have experienced the same thing. I would pass on this one.