Philips DVDR5500 DVD Recorder

The standard facilities are very good, I particularly like the 2.5hr recording time option, something I've not seen on others. It has needed a reboot a couple of times, not good but tolerable. This seems to be more common on a range of equipment as they become dedicated computers rather than simple machines. The support from Philips, downloads and upgrades, appears to be good as well as easy to perform. However if you want something that works reliably out of the box you may need to look elsewhere, i.e. Sony,Samsung or Panasonic for example. The price difference is enough for me to choose this unit, and I'm happy at present to put up with an occasional inconvenience, I expect Philips will have it fully sorted in due course.
I was lucky enough to buy it as an ex demo unit, not that you would know from the condition it arrived in, only the tape on the box had been disturbed. I got it for about half retail price, and it came with up to date firmware and region free. A good machine if you want to watch region 1 DVD's, there are simple instructions available via forums on the internet for changing its region settings.
I do not believe that the disc runs all the time as has been said in some of the forums, maybe this has been fixed on a recent upgrade.
Once again, if you're a bit of a technophobe, and have a bit more money to spend then you would probably benefit from looking at other machines, I suspect this machine is a couple of more firmware upgrades away from being bullet proof.