Over the past decade a digital format, CD, has replaced records and tapes as the preferred choice for music. Over the past 5 years, DVD has replaced the videotape as the preferred choice for movies. Now, dreary old VHS videotape is under attack by the digital upstarts. DVD recorders have (finally) arrived on the scene, and are now more reasonably priced.

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The Philips DVDR985 is the latest of this breed, and at $999.00 MSRP it breaks the important $1,000.00 mark. This recorder uses the DVD+RW format for rewritable, and the DVD+R format for one time recordable. This format is not part of the DVD Forum (those are DVD-RAM, DVD-RW, DVD-R), yet holds the promise of being more compatible with read-only players. Indeed, both +RW and +R discs worked without problem on my Kenwood DV-5700, and also on a Denon 1600 I had on hand (see review on page 42). There is a website, DVDplusRW.org, which lists the compatibility of other players.

The Philips only comes in silver, and its look is clean and modern. The front panel has a large LED display in the center. The bottom half of the LED display is a "Disc Bar" that denotes the amount of the disc that has been used, as well as title breaks. When you first turn the DVDR985 on, two small lines go back and forth on the player just like the front light on KITT, the car from Knight Rider. (This just goes to show how popular culture becomes a part of industrial design. Anyone ever notice that Motorola flip phones look like the communicators from the original Star Trek) The 985 has player controls to the right of the display, power and monitor buttons on the left, and below the latter is a strip with feature logos on it. This strip is removable, and behind it are composite, S-Video, audio, and FireWire IEEE1 394 hookups. The FireWire hookup is called I-Link, and with it you can connect a miniDV camcorder and record onto DVD digitally.

Unique Features - On the back, the immense flexibility of the Philips continues. There is a coaxial input and output from a cable-ready tuner, S-Video in and out, composite in and out, audio in and out and, what makes the 985 really special, component in and out. This is the only player that I know of that accepts component signals as an input, although it only accepts an interlaced signal. There is a coaxial digital bitstream out, but the audio input is only analog, more than likely a concession to piracy fears. Furthermore, there is a separate progressive component output to take advantage of another feature of the 985, the Faroudja de-interlacer with DCDi (for an explanation of the Faroudja de-interlacer and DCDi, reference the Kenwood Sovereign DV-5700 review in the Premiere Issue).

Installation/Setup - Setting up the player is rather straightforward, although the pictograph system menu uses somewhat cryptic characters, but it was simple enough to figure out after a few minutes. Let's start by answering the question on everyone's mind: no, the 985 cannot be used to copy DVDs. Besides the copy protection on all prerecorded DVDs, and the lack of digital inputs so Dolby Digital or DTS can be recorded, there is the fact that all recordable/rewritable DVDs are single layer, and therefore limited to 4.7GB. Most pre-recorded DVDs are dual layer, and therefore up to 9.4GB, so there is usually more information on them than could be recorded.

I tested the playback capability of the 985 using a pre-recorded DVD. After hooking it up via the progressive component output, I discovered much to my delight (and surprise) that the picture quality of the Philips was nothing short of excellent. The Faroudja de-interlacing gave a smooth artifact-free picture, and the quality is fairly close to the Kenwood DV-5700 I have as my reference (which has one of the better pictures available under $4,000). What separated the two was a bit more grain to the picture, making it just a little less film-like, but the difference was not great. The picture was sharp, smooth, and the color fidelity was almost dead on even before calibration. This should probably come as no surprise as the Philips Q50, which has a similar video section, has long been known to have excellent progressive picture quality.

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