What Hi Fi Sound and Vision
14 MAY 2008
Pioneer DVR-540HX
At first glance, this Pioneer recorder is quite an impressive beast: visually, it’s one of the more imposing units on the market, and it’s also one of the most well built, with a neatly designed fascia featuring four main control buttons and a flip-down lid for secondary controls.
The Pioneer carries the kind of impressive spec we’ve come to expect from a recorder in this price class: there’s a 160GB hard-disk drive, and it’s also compatible with all three DVD recording formats – DVD-R/-RW, DVD+R/+RW and DVD-RAM. It can both record and play any of these discs, so this is one product where you can blissfully ignore the minutiae of the DVD recording format war.
The Pioneer also offers an impressive eight recording speeds, including a manual mode that allows you a staggering maximum of 455 hours on your hard drive.
However, we tend to think that if you have a 160GB hard-disk drive on board, you’ll be best served only using the best recording mode – and when your hard disk gets full, simply archive shows onto DVD. This way, you’ll be getting a quality of recorded material no different from the incoming signal.
Recordings are indistinguishable from the original
And the Pioneer’s Freeview tuner offers a perfectly good, though not class-leading picture. It’s stable, solid and quite detailed, and even sports programmes don’t force it into unwanted motion judder.
Recording – either to disc or hard drive – is spot-on, offering a recording that is indistinguishable from the original incoming signal.
Our criticism of the Pioneer’s picture is most obviously apparent when you put it to use as a straightforward DVD player. Feed it with some shop-bought movie favourites and the DVR-540HX’s picture performance, while decent overall, exhibits a lack of fine detail and sharply defined edges.
There’s a soft, hazy quality to images that doesn’t compare favourably with the razor-sharp definition of some rivals. Plus, the Pioneer’s sound is a little too soft, rich and ill-defined for it to receive an unreserved recommendation.
To summarise, Pioneer’s DVR-540HX is a reasonable unit, but it’s let down by a standard of performance that some of its rivals show a clean pair of heels to.