DVDs

September 20th, 2005

When Ben was born we bought a camcorder in order to capture his every waking moment no matter how insignificant. Being the 21st century, it was of course a digital one and until now we’ve had no means to play back our captured hours of gurgling baby-footage to enthralled family audiences. The VHS has long since expired, never to be replaced.

Until that is, we took a trip to PC World to buy a DVD writer which my research had told me could be bought for under £50. At the last moment though I realised that some kind of DVD authoring software might be needed so the budget was unexpectedly bumped up by £25 based on a quick search around the web.

On the way to PC World, you have to walk past Currys so we popped in there to look at DVD recorders just out of interest since it was in the rough area of what we were looking to buy.

“Ooh, there’s one for £100″

“Not bad, but can we put the camcorder stuff on a DVD with that?”

“Yep, it just plugs straight in and you record from the tape”

“Cool, would that be better?”

“We could record TV programs too”

“Let’s get that then. You can still edit things though, right?”

“No, you’d need to do that on the computer. You could copy it over from the PC, but there’d be a small loss in quality. That one there’s got a digital input, so you could do it better with that one, and it’s got time-slip and it’s only £180″

“What does timeslip do?”

“Well you leave a disc in and it records what you’re watching, so you can pause live TV, or start watching something before it’s finished recording it”

“Ah that’d be good for when Ben wakes up or cries in the middle of watching something”

“Yeah. This one here’s got a hard-disc for only £250. You can tape 100 hours of telly without a disc, e.g. tell it to tape a whole series of something, and put it onto DVD later if you want.”

“Ooh, that’d be good. Does the budget stretch that far?”

“Not sure. I’m not sure how it all works really. Maybe it doesn’t work with a cheapo freeview box from Asda”

“Why not?”

“I can’t work out how you’d tape something on one channel and watch another”

“That’s a bit useless then. What a con.”

“Hang on, this one’s got a built in freeview tuner and it’s only £280″

“Would that work?”

“I think so, it’s all kinda confusing, hang on we’ll find a sales person”

At this moment, there was a mighty smell accompanied by an (in)appropriate noise from Ben’s nappy. We departed swiftly to Burger King to have a cup of tea and abuse their baby changing area.

It was a good thing too, because the extra time allowed us to come to our senses and realise that all we actually wanted to do in the first place was put some edited camcorder footage onto DVD and, in fact, we didn’t watch much telly anyway.

Off we went to PC World where we found a nice budget friendly Sony DVD writer with lovely authoring software for a mere £54.

Thank God for baby diarrhea!

Of course by that stage the budget had been slackened and our mood was spend-happy, so we threw in a 19″ flat panel monitor and an internal flash card reader too, all of which was entirely necessary.

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