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The following is the continuation of my fool-me-once...go to Hell, Philips story. Here is my tale of woe regarding
both of my Philips DVDR985 DVD recorders.
I had two of these things. One got replaced within weeks because it was basically dead. The other ran for weeks and weeks before requiring its first of three services. Now, the first unit and the second unit had the options for me to buy the extended warranty coverage so that if anything happened in the first 3 years, I would be covered. I bought the coverage for unit #2 (based on unit #1 needing ot be replaced) but when I went to buy coverage for the new unit #1, their records and paperwork still showed that such coverage would be for the dead unit. No matter what I did, Philips failed miserably to provide be the necessary form with proper serial number so I could get the new unit #1 coverred. After a year, I gave up. My bad. About 3 months out of warranty, unit #1 died. Of course, this was not without going through prolonged death throws where it took along about 20 discs. Well, I went to take the unit to the Philips service center here in the Bay Area only to find that they had closed it with no forwarding address. It took three days of trying to get the Philips website to go where it was suppose to list repair centers, and two phone calls to finally get someone at Philips Customer Service (hah!) to give me the name of the local independent service shop that could handle my unit. They informed me that there were no available parts to repair what appeared to be wrong.
Philips unit #2 lasted until October of 2004 when it, too, decided to start the death march by killing about 2 out of every 5 dics put into it. I called the local guys and said that I had the extended warranty on it. They said that Philips was still trying to decide whether to replace all warranty units of to try to scare up some replacement drives and mother boards... and that their shop had a backlog (and a tall stack) of over 20 of the things and expected that it might be a couple months before I could get mine through the system. Well, I went out and bought another Sony GX300. Great little machines, so far. Can use both +R/RW and -R/RW discs, which is nice. Fairly straight forward menues provide 1 or 2 click access to just about everything. In early December I got the bug up my behind to get my unit #2 Philips replaced, so I contacted the local shop and was told that if I brought it in, they would either have a repair or replace decision from Philips within a week. Hurray! I dusted it off and took it in. The tech listened to the symptoms and indicated that it was probably more than just a drive mechanism issue, but that Philips would need to make the final determination. That was on a Saturday (the 11th). I received a phone call from Philips on that Monday (the 13th) informing me that my unit was not able to be repaired so they were offering me a Magnaxox unit to replace it unless I had any issue with that. I researched the Magnavox unit only to discover that is was the very bottom of the line with almost 3/4 of the functionality and capabilities I use missing. I called them back to say that it was not going to be sufficient and they offered a new Philips DVDR520H instead. That has most of what I use and includes an 80MB hard disk drive as well to record programs onto. I said Yes.
Within 10 days the service guy called me to say that the Philips unit had been delivered and I could come pick it up any time. My faith in Philips, at least from a service standpoint, seemed to be on the verge of being renewed. And then I hooked up the new unit. For a "consumer" piece of equipment is has about the most convoluted menu and functions structure I have ever seen. It takes as many as 10 button pushes to access certain things sush as naming a disc track or setting up a timer-based recording. One of the timer-based recordings I tried to make never happened. It turns out that you need to put that sort of thing into the system at least 30-60 minutes prior to when you want it to start. I only gave it 15 minutes notice and it failed to even try to record. Not too impressive from a user standpoint. And, most of the buttons on the actual unit are facing up and on the top of the unit's faceplate, meaning that you need to have this unit on top of any other compomnent or at least pulled forward 1 inch to allow for access. What genius designed this one? The quality of the finished discs are OK (just), but I sure miss the semi-professional DVDR-985's functions, features and quality of discs and menues. I'm holding on to unit #1 in the hopes that I can eventually get it repaired (at a reasonable price). Needless to say, Philip s is now on my "never going to buy another one" list.
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So,
unit #1 goes into the closet. And in comes my first Sony RDR-GX300.