Home > Consumer Reviews > Philips DVDR5520H/05 - 160 GB Hard Disk/DVD Recorder

An adequate all round recorder,however it has it's faults.
1)no zoom button on the remote control,well one that you can't access quickly and easily.
2)fast forwarding is a bit of a nightmare,as you have to hold down the button for an age before it decides if it wants to fast forward or merely jump a chapter.
3)the disc menu button is totally inadequate and almost useless,and unlike other recorders I have used if you stop the disc and remove it,when you put the disc back it continues where you left it and not back at the menu.
It does have it's good points though.
This includes an excellent time shift buffer and it is easy to record and transfer recordings to disc's.

The Philips DVDR 5520H has some good ideas from the previous Philips models. It has a USB 2 port which allows multimedia to be played directly from the flash drive or coped to its internal hard drive. Great if you download movies! Quick download, copy to a flash drive and plug it in and watch - no need to convert or burn!!

Bad point - it takes time to start up. If you're watching something and there's a knock on the door and you switch it on so you don't miss anything - well it takes around 5 to 10 seconds to boot up. Kind of defeats the purpose of having a hard drive if it doesn't start recording straight away.

Another thing is that the technology is not quite there and the whole thing can be unreliable. Sometimes when you switch it on it freezes which means you have to switch it off from behind. My model died after five months and has been with Philips for the past six weeks!!

So be aware that although the model has some good ideas they're only good if they work.

The DVDR5520H is the cheaper sibling of the DVDR5570H, the only difference being a smaller HDD capacity.

Unfortunately this also means the DVDR5520H suffers from all the instability, clunkiness and bugs - everything from crashes/freeze ups during DVD playing to the random non-download of the TV Guide - that currently plague the DVDR5570H, even with the latest firmware (3.07) from Philips.

It appears this product has been rushed to market. Don't pay to be a beta tester - let Philips sort out the problems first. Their Cineos and Aurea TVs prove there's a good company in there somewhere; the DVD5520H doesn't.

Avoid.

A number of years ago I bought a Philips DVD-RW with USB. I plug in my HDD and watched movies or photo's from my HDD. I bought this unit, also has USB, BUT only for pendrives...WHAT!, Yes. The freeview interface is just, well, not good. Press the record button and the unit tells you to hang on for a while, it needs to prepare the internal HDD, WHAT! Press the HDD button and select a file for replay and it tells you to wait a while... Here's a fantastic feature, Plug your Satellite receiver into the scart socket, put another thingy in front of the sat box... Didn't work because has to be a sat receiver from their list. This unit feels like Philips took a lot of different modules and connected it all together and it's not working well. The unit looks fantastic on the shelf, but even at the cheap price I got it at, it's still a waste of time and shelf space. The upscaling lies in the eye of the beholder. I'm glad I didn't get rid of my 80GB cheapy PVR i picked up a long time ago. It still works better than this Philips attempt at PVR. No user should endure this kind of rip-off. these consumer products should 'just work' when you plug it in. Spending hours with its user manual is not on! I turned it on tonight to see what's worth watching on TV and ther was no data for the channels. A message popped up telling me to leave the unit on standby while it downloads new software..., but I want to watch TV! The remote control is no help either, I am still looking for the button that's supposed to open and close the DVD tray. This unit is the class idiot; it drags my complete home cinema system down. Amazon, please introduce a zero star rating!