At $290, the Lite-On LVW-5045 is the least expensive of the DVD and hard drive recorders we looked at for our January 2006 roundup, despite including both a DVD and a VHS deck. But there is a trade-off: Many features that make the more-expensive hard-drive models interesting are missing from this product.

The PC World Test Center found the LVW-5045 the slowest of any recorder at recognizing a newly inserted blank DVD-R disc, taking 55 seconds to scan the disc and get ready it for recording (compared to 21 seconds for the Pioneer DVR-633H-S, which was the fastest at this task). Though not a major problem, this could be annoying if you realize that a show you want to record is about to start but you have to wait for the recorder to recognize the disc. (The delay didn't occur when recording to hard drive, however; so if you're in a hurry, you can record to hard drive and then transfer to DVD.)

The hard-drive-to-DVD transfer process was quite slow. Most of the ...

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Melissa Perenson