Lite-ON goes CE with its first hard disk DVD recorder

By Matt Whipp

Posted on 26 Oct 2004 at 17:38

Lite-ON has stepped further into the consumer arena with its first hard disk DVD recorder.

Best-known for its range of optical disc drives for PCs, the Taipei-based company is hoping to stake a claim to the front room with its £350 LVW5045.

It boasts all the features you'd expect of hard disk recording, such as time shifting so that you can 'pause' live TV while it buffers on to the disk, and watch different parts of a program while it is being recorded. And of course you can archive your programs to DVD disc to free up space on the hard disk.

Not that space should be that much of a problem. The LVW5045 boasts a 160GB hard drive. Probably more than enough for most uses. It works out at about 35 hours of high quality recording - 198 at lower settings, so even if you set it up to record shows while you're away on holiday for a week or so you're unlikely to be in danger of running out of room.

Format-wise, the burner element will write to + and - RW DVD discs, as well as CD-RWs, although the drive is single rather dual-layer, so you'll only get 4.7GB a disc. Lite-ON works this out as about an hour in high-quality, or up to six at the lowest setting. It also supports a range of other video and audio formats including: DVD-Video, DVD+VR, VCD, SVCD, AudioCD, MP3, WMA and JPEG files so you can play music and view photos as well.

The UK version has multiple SCART ports as well as IEEE1394 connectors - so you can archive older videos to DVD and download footage from your camcorder.

The LVW5045 is available now.