My dad is thinking of buying a DVD recorder and has asked me what I should look out for?
I really feel like I should be able to give him an answer but I know nothing about them – it’s my job as a son to answer my dad’s technological questions and I’m failing him – what does he need to look out for?

I think they’re a bit old-hat now. I had one for ages, worked fine, but as soon as I switched to Sky HD, with the built-in PVR, I never used the DVD recorder again, and that was about a year ago.

If I was going to buy another one, I personally would start looking at BluRay recorders, but if available, they certainly won’t be cheap for a while yet…

Good point, though I think he might want to lend out the DVDs to relatives who are even less technologically adept than him.

In that case I can’t really recommend a model. The one I had/still have was a right noisy beast, branded “Lite-On” or something. It worked, but do had to keep on top of the system clock if you wanted to do timer recording – it would gain about a minute a week, which is fine at the start of the program but you had to give a few minutes overrun at the end or be left with annoyingly permanent cliff-hangers 😉

I would certainly look for something with Freeview or equivalent built in, and if possible, upscaling to mock HD

Only advice I can give is don’t get a Toshiba.

We got my Dad one a few yrs ago and it is the most unintuitive, difficult to use piece of consumer electronics I have ever had the misfortune of attempting to use.

Even following the instruction manual to the letter didn’t always yield the expected results. It was utter tripe.

Something like this> http://www.johnlewis.com/230911097/Product.aspx
Record stuff to the HDD and he can then burn to DVD if he wants to lend them out?
I’ve had a Pioneer one for years now and it’s been great. They only seem to do them for about £500 now though.