Lx9000r

[Kera]

I took delivery of my Philips LX9000R a couple of days ago. My first impression is not fantastic. The quality of the picture and sound (from a DVD) seems good. The machine also looks good. However I have the following frustrations. Please note that Philips have adviced returning it for an inspection, but this would be a real pain as I bought it over the internet and it is heavy.

1) It appears I must press the DVD button and hold it for a second prior to being able to stop recording with the stop button. This may be how I am using it as I don't find the interface particularly intuitive.

2) The fast forward button only seems to offer X4 and X32 speeds which make finding a section of material very difficult.

3) The rear speaker cables are a tad too short for my room

4) One night, I set the recorder to record my wedding video to DVD and came down in the morning to find it still in record mode and unable to stop it although the video tape had played and ejected. The only way I could stop it was to pull the plug.

5) I have not yet found a way to set "safe recording mode" as a default, which would be useful.

6) There is not much info on the benefit of connecting to my Freeview box with a digital audio cable. I am unsure if this will give surround sound from digital TV. (Can anyone advise?)

7) Some info is only displayed on the front panel and is very small. This would be good if it was repeated on the screen.

Does anyone else have any experiences with this machine as the X4 and X32 issue does not seem the type of issue that would be unique to a single unit and I don't wish to return it if there is no fix?

 

[Kera]

Having played with the machine for a while now:

I have avoided the need to return the unit as my experimentation revealed that the problem I had with my machine freezing part way through a recording was due to the DVD+RW disk that was supplied with the unit being faulty. Philips have sent me a replacement disk.

1) Having to press the DVD button prior to being able to stop recording is not much of a nuisance, it purely selects the mode that the key relates to.

2) The fast forward button only offering X4 and X32 speeds was confirmed to me by Philips helpline to be a purposeful change as there were issues when this option offered other speeds. The other speeds are still available from the systems menu or it is very convenient to go to the end of a clip by entering a time point in a clip. I also notice that X32 speed appears to be much faster forwards than in reverse!

4) The recorder appears to have stayed in record mode because my wedding video was around 2 hours long and on a 3 hour tape. I had set the LX9000R to record for 2.5 hours. At 2 hours it detected that there was no signal and stopped writting to disk but waited for a further signal. The way to avoid having to unplug seems to be to play the start of the tape to resume the signal, after which I can stop the recording.

6) I have now connected the LX9000R to my TV with an optical digital audio cable and there does seem to be an improvement in the sound quality from the TV. It was difficult to put the cable in to my Pace Twin Freeview box as it is so close to the SCART. "Well done" Philips for avoiding this issue on the LX9000R.

EXTRA INFO THAT I HAVE NOTICED

8) I had some home video that I had moved from my camera to VHS tape with a black screen at the start. I had to start recording after the black section, otherwise the white areas of the image in the video wash-out the picture. I imagine that this is some sort of auto white balance feature of the LX9000R.

9) If trying to set a cut point or new title image on a recorded section, the disk is prone to jumping around by a frame or so which is rather frustrating.

10) If I delete a section greater than (10 minutes I think) from the centre of a recording, I get a menu image showing a free recording position in the centre of the disk and another at the end. The person on the helpline from Philips said it shouldn't do this, but also said that if I started recording after all the recorded chapters, that the machine wouldn't reuse any gaps that had been created due to deleting footage. I would be interested to know more about this and to confirm it. I wonder if there is any way to do some sort of defragmentation using a PC.

11) If I have edited material by cutting and deleting, I end up with an image in the menu for each piece. I am yet to find a way of keeping the clips but hiding the titles in the menu apart from the first.

12) The title menu shows a string of images from the chapters which is one chapter wide. This creates the need for a lot of scrolling. An option to place them 2 abreast would be very useful.

I hope this may help other users of this unit and I'd really like to hear of any other hints and tips on using teh LX9000R.

 

[quard]

Dear Kera,

I've just bought the machine but I found its S-Video output (via SCART->S-video converter) can not work, only B&W on the TV, no color!!! I've set the machine to S-Video through the SETUP/PICTURE config. Do you have this prolem?

Thanks,
Quard