I had a HDD/DVD Recorder for my 21st birthday which runs like a dream. It has an 80gb hard drive which I record my VHS tapes into, then edit them with chapters and cut out commercial breaks, then burn them onto DVD. The picture quality I find is sometimes slightly better than the original VHS recordings! (That I can never work out why!)

The menus on my custom DVD's are extremely primitive but I really couldn't care less about that, it's the material on the DVD's that I'm more concerned about.

Mine is a Daewoo DVD recorder and it was around £130. DVD Recorders with hard drives are slightly more expensive but I highly recommend you get one with.