Disc Jockeying
Sydney Morning Herald
Monday January 15, 2001
A DVD recorder available right now, and for only $1,500? Surely it couldn't be true?
It wasn't. I'd misread the press release. Yet in one way, Hitachi's DV-W1A is even more exciting than a DVD recorder. The left-hand tray of this machine will play back either DVDs or CDs. The right-hand tray not only plays back CDs but will record on them as well, and it accepts either write-once CD-R discs or the completely reuseable CD-RW blanks.
As a DVD player, there's little the Hitachi DV-W1A doesn't have. One interesting feature is its PAL60 circuit. Older TVs cannot display NTSC pictures, yet an increasing number of DVDs are now coded using the American NTSC TV standard. The PAL60 circuit converts NTSC images into PAL so they'll display on old TVs, but the television must still have an AV or composite video input for this to work.
A rather bulky infra-red remote allows complete control over all player functions but has no lighting system, so the buttons are difficult to read in dim light.
The DV-W1A has built-in Dolby Digital 5.1 decoding, but Hitachi has not enabled all the decoder's features. You can't adjust the volume of the five channels individually, nor can you program time delays to compensate for your speakers being different distances from the listening position. For best audio performance bypass the inbuilt decoder and connect the player's digital output to a full-featured audio/video receiver. If you plan to connect the DV-W1A directly to a stereo TV (or an ordinary two-channel hi-fi amplifier), an inbuilt Spatializer circuit will deliver a realistic surround effect from your two front-channel loudspeakers.
Because the two trays operate independently, you can dub from one CD to another by putting the CD to be recorded in the left-hand DVD tray and a blank CD in the right-hand tray. Copying is as simple as pressing the ``Dub" button. The Hitachi allows you to dub a complete CD, a single track from a CD or a preprogrammed series of tracks using the same simple process. There's even a high-speed (2x) dubbing mode, so you can copy a complete CD in 35 minutes.
Picture quality was excellent, and the various slow-motion and high-speed modes worked well. Hitachi's zoom control magnifies the onscreen image to two or four times its normal size, after which sections of the screen can be selected using the 1-9 buttons on the remote.
If you've been thinking of taking the plunge into DVD and don't mind the idea of being able to record your own CDs, Hitachi's DV-W1A is a classy way of killing two birds with a single stone.
Info file
Hitachi DV-W1A DVD Player/CD Recorder
Price: $1,499
Hitachi Australia Ltd
13-15 Lyonpark Road, North Ryde, NSW 2113
(02) 9888 4100
1800 789 799
info@hitachi.com.au
www.hitachi.com.au
© 2001 Sydney Morning Herald
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