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On the upside, the DVD-R135 has one of our favorite features: flexible recording. Selecting this option allows you to completely fill a DVD with your program, maximizing the video quality. Because the recorder needs to "know" how long the program will be to optimize the quality setting, flexible recording is available only for timer recordings--which is a standard shortcoming of DVD recorders without a hard drive. This isn't a problem for fixed-length programs such as movies, but you might want to pad it on something like a football game that can run long. Another feature we liked was commercial skip, which is conveniently adjustable to 15, 30, or 60 seconds so that you can blast through ads.
The DVD-R135's connectivity is highlighted by its HDMI output, which is capable of upscaling to 480p, 720p, and 1080i resolutions. While almost all recent HDTVs can do this upconversion on their own, it's possible that the picture quality can benefit if the upscaling processing in the DVD player is superior to the processing in your TV. This increase in image quality is very dependent on the display used, so it's worthwhile to try one of these units on your TV before buying if you're expecting big results. The rest of the connectivity suite is made up of two A/V inputs (one with S-Video), two A/V outputs (one with S-Video), a component video output, an antenna input/output, and two digital audio inputs (one optical, one coaxial). Around the front is also a DV input for easy hookup to a camcorder.
Performance
Recording quality was good on the Samsung DVD-R135, although not quite up to the level of the excellent Panasonic DMR-ES25S. The unit has four recording-quality modes: XP, SP, LP, and EP. XP and SP offer the best quality, and the difference between them is slight. On the other hand, LP mode suffers a significant loss in resolution, and we'd recommend against using it for anything where image quality matters, such as movies. This is the area where the Panasonic DMR-ES25S has the largest advantage; its LP mode is almost as good as its SP mode, which means you can double the amount of content that can fit on a DVD with relatively small loss in video resolution. It's an even bigger issue considering that the DVD-R135 can't handle dual-layer media. Watching actual program material in the various modes echoed what we saw in resolution patterns. Recorded scenes from Aeon Flux, for example, looked sharp in XP and SP mode, but compression artifacts and jaggies in LP and EP mode seriously distracted from the viewing experience.
Video playback performance was a little above average, but a full notch below the best players we've seen. For example, the resolution pattern from Silicon Optix's HQV test suite revealed that it could pass full DVD resolution, but we noticed that some parts of the image were flickering and not stable. While it passed tests with three shifting lines and a rotating line, an image detail test revealed some strange jaggies in marble steps that would follow cars as they drive by. The DVD-R135 also failed a 2:3 pull-down test, as moire could be seen in the grandstands as a race car goes by. However, we confirmed that it had 2:3 pull-down processing on Star Trek: Insurrection, as it rendered the bridge and boat hulls smoothly. Switching over to the Windows DVD Test Annex, we also noticed that the DVD-R135 sometimes suffered from the chroma bug error, which resulted in very noticeable jaggies on moving animated fish. We should note, however, that this error would be noticeable only on improperly authored DVDs. Switching over to actual program material was better, but not perfect. We watched a few scenes from Serenity, and for the most part it looked sharp. However, we did feel that it looked significantly noisier than other upconverting DVD players we've looked at, such as the Oppo DV-970HD.
Disc compatibility was solid overall. It was able to playback all types of recorded DVDs, including DVD-RAM and DVDs with MP3s on them. This is in contrast to the disc compatibility problems we've continued to have on Panasonic recorders. If you have a large library of burned DVDs from another recorder, you might want to steer toward the DVD-R135 to be safe.
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