Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #51475 in Consumer Electronics
• Brand: Lite-On
• Model: DD-A100X
• Released on: 2006-06-21
• Dimensions: 2.05" h x 9.84" w x 11.02" l, 4.41 pounds

Manufacturer's Description
Use Lite-On DVD recorders to preserve your favorite TV shows or share those precious moments of your life with others on a DVD disc. Enjoy the greatly improved audio/video quality and less shelf space for storage made possible by the new DVD media.

Easy TV Recording - Records TV, VCR to DVD+R / DVD+RW / DVD-R / DVD-RW. With DD-A100X's built-in TV tuner and versatile connection ports, you can easily record TV or other sources to DVD+R / DVD+RW and DVD-R / DVD-RW discs that lasts to build your own video library.

MP3 & WMA Playback DD-A100X serves as the most ideal Home Theater component for its sleekness, stylishness and, most of all, its capability to play back WMA, MP3 audios and audio CDs, providing the ultimate solution for audio enthusiasts.

DivX Certified - DivX® is one of the world's most popular high-compression MPEG-4 video technology, with DivX® files available on PCs and networks worldwide. DD-A100X plays all versions of DivX® video (including DivX®) with standard playback of DivX® media files.

Easy DV Dubbing, Connect a DV Camcorder to the "DV Link" to easily archive camcorder footages digitally in DVD quality to a DVD recordable disc that lasts. Moreover, the on-screen DV Control panel allows basic commands over the DV camcorder using DD-A100X's remote control.

Easy Guider - The advanced user-friendly interface, Easy Guider menu, makes using DD-A100X a snap. At the press of a few buttons, you are guided through all the major features available. It's never been so easy and fun!

Box Contents

Customer Reviews

Excellent but disappointed!
This is my first venture into DVD stand alone recording after years of using VCR's. I had looked around for a long time and decided on this recorder because of the dual writing formats (DVD-R/RW & DVD+R/RW).The DivX playback was also a bonus although I must admit to having merely tested this feature so far and have not used it greatly.

The unit comes well packaged with remote, batteries, instruction manual, DVD+RW disc and phono connection lead. It is small in size and neat in appearance. Connection was straight forward with 2 scarts available on the rear panel as well as the phono out connections. Start up of the unit appears slow in comparison to a VCR, this along with requiring to 'prepare' the disc before recording would make it difficult to try and do the equivalent of 'slapping a tape in' as we used to do with VCR's to record that programme which has just started!
Following the instructions, setup was achieved in reasonable time although the TV tuner is "automatic" and takes time to search through the entire frequency band and pick up the channels. The channels can then be 'sorted' since it does not automatically put BBC1 on Channel 1 etc although I ended up deleting one by mistake and having to go through the tuning setup again. This is because you cannot add a channel, if a new channel happened to come on-air you would need to go through the tuning setup again to find all the channels including the new one. Apart from this one moan this unit was very easy to set-up.
The recording quality I have found to be very good on the media I have tried so far, a Philips +RW disc (supplied with the unit), Ricoh DVD+R, TDK DVD-R and Memorex DVD+RW. However my personal difficulties started from here. The unit was purchased primarily to copy my home made videos from the last twenty years onto DVD's before they degraded any further. I hooked up the VCR and copied an amount of tape to the DVD (I used SP which gives good quality but only two hours on a DVD) I then finalised the disc. It played back perfectly in the Lite-on - a good quality copy. I then took it to my 'Daewoo' DVD/VCR combi and tried it - no luck, the DVD ran but stuttered every ten seconds or so. I tried it in an old 'Matsui' player - the same happened. It did work in a 'Durabrand' DVD player from ASDA but didnt in a brand new 'Dual' DVD recorder/VCR combi also from ASDA. The instructions have the get out clause 'finalised discs will be compatible with most DVD players'. Maybe its just my luck but one out of four other players managing to play it doesn't sound like 'most' to me!
I have tried over the last few weeks different media - I have even tried ripping the files to my computer and re-burning them to blank media which I know work fine in these other players - still no luck. Whilst I am assured incompatability is not a problem unique to the Lite-on it is not helped by the writing format of the unit which writes in such a way that limited editing of the DVD can be done on RW discs prior to finalising. Even when finalised the discs do not contain the usual files present on a normal DVD (an Audio_TS folder and a Video_TS folder). I cannot say that this is the whole problem but I am now convinced it is a large contributor.

In summary if you are looking for a unit to record DVD's and play back on the same unit I would thoroughly recommend this Lite-on. However if, like me, you have different players you want to use the discs on I would suggest looking elsewhere.

Highly recommended
I bought this unit on the recommendation of a friend who has had both the current model and a previous one and although I've only had it for a short time I haven't been disappointed.

Here are what I consider to be the plus points:

[1] It can play just about any format of disk that you're likely to need, including DivX.

[2] Compact size. The recorder is really small and unlike many other so-called compact units which turn out to have massive external power supplies, this one has a built in supply.

[3] The guider button on the remote gives rapid access to all of the main functions. If you can't set the timer on this recorder then you're not really trying!

[4] Fairly large remote with well laid-out buttons, although I feel that the main playback buttons could have been larger.

[5] Can be converted to multi-region playback using details obtained from the Internet.

[6] Excellent price. You'd expect to pay over £100 for recorders with similar capabilities to this one from the better-known makers. I haven't taken the lid off to look at the build quality inside, but externally it doesn't look `cheap'.

[7] Records to DVD + and - formats. Having previously used mainly DVD-RWs I was impressed by the quick formatting and finalising speeds of DVD+RWs.

There are a few negative points but don't be too put-off by them:

[-1] There's no VideoPlus+

[-2] Apart from three LEDs there is no front display - it's all done on-screen.

[-3] Slow to boot-up - around 30 seconds.

[-4] It's very slow when tuning in the TV channels on installation. Also, there doesn't appear to be a method of manually adding channels - the scan method is the only method available.

In summary, if you're looking for a DVD recorder then just click on the `Buy' button for this model (or its' coloured brother, the `101X) - you won't be disappointed.

Bargain or not???
I bought this thinking i had nabbed myself a bargain with its DVD+ and DVD- features aswell as Div X, and it played and recordered very well, and i was happy with it: However then i recorded some programs for a friend and they would not play so i tried again with another disc type still no good. I contacted the manufacturers who told me i needed to download an update for it ( this was a brand new machine just out) so any way i did . Then i tried again but still it wouldnt work i tried 3 different DVD players and recorders but they would not play on either. So unless your happy to just record and play on the same player i would avoid this one, for sure.