I'm getting my dad one for Christmas (a standalone one). Budger won't stretch to one with a hard drive so it will be discs only. Walking around Comet I noticed a couple of the recorders take DVD-RAM as well as discs. Is there any need for me to get one that supports DVD-RAM?

In terms of the -R +R debate is there one disc that will play best on a normal player over another? He's a teacher so might record a program to play to his class.

Ones I'm looking at are here

The Samsung DVDR122/XEU looks ok.

Advice is appreciated :

DVD-RAM works better at packet writing because they're laid out more like HDs than CDs (IIRC). DVD-RAM is the least compatible out of all the standards as you need explicit support for it. One advantage of DVD-RAM is that you can rewrite them a lot more. DVD-R is a tiny bit more compatible than DVD+R but any new DVD player/drive will work with both.

Does DVD-RAM hold more data? It would just be an added bonus though is that right?

Any opinions on that Samsung or the Toshiba DR250? Reason I like the toshiba is that its got time slip - he'd definatley make use of pausing live TV. Or maybe they all have that feature and its not being mentioned?

Edit: i meant i the toshiba has time slip, sorry.

DVD-RAM is largely irrelevant because you'll have a hard time actually finding the media for purchase.

My father got himself a Sony DVD burner / VCR combo box last year and absolutely loves it. It can do time-shifting of shows to the VCR (as traditional) or to the DVD burner. It also has a single-button for dubbing, which is truly brilliant compared to the annoyance of doing it through your computer.

I recently burned 8 copies of baby videos on DVD-R to sent to family for the holidays. On my older Panasonic RP-56 DVD player (one of the early players to have decent progressive scan output), some of the discs work great and others have problems. I suspect that newer DVD players that explicitly know about DVD-R will work fine.