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Rick Rizner
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...