Editorial Review:

Item Description:
Dazzle DVD Recorder provides a simple, affordable way to make high-quality home video. Let your friends and family enjoy movies on professional-looking DVDs, complete with menus and chapters. This plug-and-play USB 2.0 device captures video to DVD, directly from VCRs, camcorders or other video equipment. Add your own menu and chapter functions for simple navigation. Burn your video to a DVD without first copying files to the PC hard drive, saving valuable time and space. Combined with the unique wizard-based, friendly interface of the Dazzle Instant DVD Recorder software, the powerful Dazzle video capture device allows you to quickly and affordably back up personal video collections.

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Rating: - * DAZZLE DVD RECORDER ...
THIS IS AN EASY TO USE PROGRAM WITH A LOT OF OPTIONS. IT IS WORTH THE PURCHASE PRICE.

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Rating: - * Very Disappointing: Buy a DVD Recorder Instead ...
Dazzle made perfect sense: an inexpensive peripheral that would pipe video directly into a USB port so it could be edited and burned onto DVD. But in fact it's a disaster. People who gave it a five-star rating must be blessed somehow: My experience matched the one-star ratings.

The software that comes with it isn't Vista-compatible. Pinnacle's website doesn't make it obvious where the upgraded software can be found. The upgraded software is 211MB for the DVD recorder (never mind the "Studio" editing software). Good luck if (like me) you use a dial-up connection.

The upgraded software crashed the system (blue screen of death) during installation. When the system came back up, the drivers for the DVD drive had been corrupted (fixing this requires going into the registry editor). Once I got it running, the resulting video was unsatisfactory -- fuzzy around the edges and had interference patterns along the bottom.

Perhaps there are ways to fix all this, but the point is that it's not the easy-to-use, plug-and-play, amateur-friendly device it claims to be.

So: I returned "Dazzle" (the first time I've ever sent something back to Amazon) and bought an entry-level regular DVD recorder for only about $30 more. My time and aggravation were worth at least that much. The DVD-R was easy to set up and worked perfectly the first time out. Sorry, Pinnacle, but I strongly recommend that course of action instead of buying Dazzle.

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Rating: - * Hace su funcion ...
Funciona bien cuando pasas video de forma simultanea, para la edicion y manejo del software se requiere de un equipo de computo potente. Pero logre mi cometido, salvar mis vhs a dvd!!

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Rating: - * Works as advertised ...
It's simple to use and relatively inexpensive. Not terribly flexible. However, it does what I want it to.

/j

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Rating: - * Dazzle was a flash in the pan ...
Dazzle DVD Instant Recorder was a fabulous product out of the box. I was impressed with its ease of installation and ease of initial use. When I tried to burn to double layer DVD's, however, the product failed. After a week of emails with their support team, this was their solution: "I suggest to try to burn the videos to a hard disk folder instead then burn it using a third party software."

I replied with, "Forgive my boldness, but your recommendation that I copy to hard drive first, and then buy other software for burning to DVD is unacceptable. I bought Dazzle Instant DVD Recorder specifically to copy my VHS tapes to DVD. The outside of the box says in five places that this software is for copying videos directly to DVD's. Example: "Easy to Archive - Record your videos directly to DVDs without copying to your hard drive, saving both time and space with Pinnacle Instant DVD Recorder software."

Their final answer was: `I have verified this information and I regret to tell you that this feature is not currently supported by Instant DVD Recorder. This is a product limitation."

In the end it was a poor brand of DVD+RDL that I was using and not Dazzle's fault at all, but their ridiculous answer and obvious blow-off was inexcusable.

Now I am getting run-time errors every time I burn a DVD. Their forms and knowledge base have been no help, and I would be dumb to contact their out-sourced third-world tech support again.

Save your money - this product doesn't live up to its claim.