Rating: 
Summary: Excellent value DVD recorder
Review: I've had this DVD recorder for a week and so far it has done very well. I have had no problem recording from DirecTV.
I have been using KHypermedia DVD +R discs and the recordings play fine on my Apex AD 1500 and my Compaq R3000 laptop.
(You need to finalize your DVD +R disc before playing on other players)
From what I read on the web, this unit is identical to Daytek DVR-P30 and is a rebadged Liteon 5001 with a cooling fan.
The main drawback is the inability to edit recordings to to filter commercials etc.
Overall I am very happy with this purchase and hope it continues to perform well.
Rating:
Summary: DVD Recorder at the Right Price!
Review: As a long time satisfied repeat buyer of Akai, it's good to see their products back on the market. I've been waiting to buy a DVD-Recorder until the prices came down and now after getting and using the actual unit, i wish i would have bought it earlier. The picture quality of the recordings and the ease of use are top flight, this is a great product!
Rating: 
Summary: Response To John From Canada
Review: .... thanks for the info about the hidden/secret menu. What you said about the Daytek version also applies to the Akai DVDRW 120 version. Just did it with the unit I've had for almost 2 weeks. Maybe future products will not have this secret menu but mine does. Thanks again.... really good tip.
Rating:
Summary: IT WORKS!
Review: After doing much research on inexpensive DVD recorders I bought this one. I am transferring all my old home movies from VHS tapes to DVD. The Memorex +RW media works great and plays in all players I tried, including the DVD Rom on the computer. The +R media only seems to play in the Akai unit that recorded it. I also wanted to edit raw footage from my Hi8 camcorder using authoring software on my computer. I had tried capturing it with a capture card straight to the computer but had major trouble with audio sync. Now I record it to DVD, rip it on to my hard drive, edit it, and send it back to the unit with the firewire to burn it. A great solution for all my needs for $199!
Rating:
Summary: So Far, So Good
Review: Just recieved this unit a few days ago and have transferred some of my recorded VHS tapes (movies) to DVD+R discs with no problem. Had to read the instructions over several times and finally got it all figured out and it was off to the races. Bought a 10 pack of Maxell DVD+Rs and the results are fantastic at SP speed. However, dvds will not play on my current dvd player, not the fault of the unit, will have to get a newer player that plays DVD+R and DVD+RW dvds, I see several players listed at Amazon that will play them in today's world, so that will solve that minor problem. This is all I have done so far with the unit and it was the main purpose of me buying it... it was a good price, good brand name and I wanted my tapes transferred to a more permanent storage medium as quick as possible. It makes chapter marks at any time you want.... I have chapters every 10 minutes, thinking of changing it to 6 minutes. I want to get a few blank DVD+RWs to test some tapes first before using a permanent +R blank. I have no complaints yet... I hope it's around working years from now, it's all I will need .... will hook it up to cable to use as a digital VCR with the +RWs, but my priority now is to get my tapes onto +Rs first.
Rating:
Summary: Easy to use DVD+R/W recorder
Review: After reading the reviews of some other bug-ridden DVD+R/W recorders I decided to wait until something better came along. Am I glad I did! This recorder at just under $200 is the least expensive on the market. Akai is a well known quality brand who exited the US market in the late 1980s or early 1990s. I owned both a reel-to-reel tape recorder and cassette tape deck from them, and both were well built and reliable. This DVD recorder is easy to use. The manual is very simple. It has a few translation errors (overwrited instead of overwritten) but the instructions are clear and I was up and running in no time. My first endeavor was to copy 8mm home video tapes. These transferred easily and there are simple steps to create multiple selection entries per DVD. It also automatically inserts chapter markers everyone 5 minutes which is very convenient for quick scanning. You can title each selection as well, and the selection picture shows the image from the start of the selection recording. Picture quality was excellent, though I admit my 8mm tapes don't strain the limit of the 2 hour recording mode. After burning some Maxell DVD+Rs, I tried them on several DVD decks. The only one that didn't work was a new auto Panasonic DVD Player. I suspect it was the player as Panasonic supports DVD-R. The disks played fine in a newer Samsung and Toshiba DVD players as well as a 5 year old Panasonic DVD Player. Overall, Akai has come through with a great product at a great price. Akai distribution is spotty so I think Amazon may be the only source for this great buy.
Rating:
Summary: Such A Deal
Review: I have this Akai DVDRW120. I bought it because of the Secret Menu. I have used it for about a month and it has worked flawlessly. The copies it makes are like the origonals. I searched for another on the entire Internet. I bought the last one from Amazon. I am hopeful that it will work as well as the one I have.
The menus are easy, the formatting easier. It looks good and works great. I may have the last "new" unit in existance because I searched high and low including ebay, where I got my first unit.
I will write more when I receive my 2nd unit from Amazon.
Rating:
Summary: Pretty Easy to Use But...
Review: I bought the Gateway AR230 so I could archive a closetful of old Beta (yes, Beta!) and VHS tapes I recorded over the years. I basically record using the 6-hour option which means I can copy 3 VHS tapes onto a singel DVD. Works pretty well and is a piece of cake to use except occasionally the AR230 gets confused and refuses to copy a tape - it thinks a tape is copy protected when it isn't. I called Gateway and they weren't able to help. Maybe there's a hack out there that'll let me do that (I did find out that you can bypass the region code via a secret menu). For the price it's an OK bit of kit.
Rating: 
Summary: Akai DVDRW120
Review: This unit records great until it finalizes the disk, at this point you can get really bad artificks and blocking with dvd stopping and hard to read.
I find from the menu it is a Liteon clone for parts, so don't waste your money on this unit.
Rating: 
Summary: Uncertain
Review: I am still uncertain about this Recorder. The unit is the least expensive I found and it looks good. Does it work? ... well, sometimes ...
I couldn't use any of the 5 Memorex DVD+R I bought initially.
Based on recommendation here, I then bought a 50 pack Fuji DVD+R disks. I transfered 5, 6 VHS tapes to them, the unit worked wonderfully. Then it stopped working. This past week, I tried about 10 blank disks, the unit either could not read it, could not format it, or had a write failure after a few minutes.
I am going to try different brands of media next week. I do hate to throw good money after bad though ....
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