VCRs - Product Reviews

smirkingboy - (December 03, 2004) I've found these reviews very useful, so I thought give back a little and help out my fellow pricegrabbers: If you're looking at this deck, you are probably a video prosumer or beginner-professional, looking to get a nice deck that will firewire-connect to your computer, thus saving the life of your video camera. One look at the lowest-end pro deck puts a lump in your throat, because they're $3000, right? So you figure you can buy this nice-looking deck for $800, and problem solved, right? WRONG. I did and I'm paying the price. It falls short. It misreads tapes constantly and is constantly telling me to clean the heads. I get little blips or worse blips on captured video all the tim

dhom88 - (April 20, 2004) Sure you can pay more for a VCR, but do you need to? This VCR is a hi-fi, SVHS unit with s-video and audio in/out. If you're looking to capture higher video resolution source or better audio quality source, VHS technology is probably not where you want to invest anyway.

CRinewalt - (January 03, 2004) Has all the strengths of the HM-DH30K and a few improvements. In D-VHS mode, playback begins a few seconds faster from stop and pause, and transfers into play faster from FF and RW. The analog playback and recording has been improved a little as well. The menus look much nicer and are easier to navigate. The OSD is also nicer, but takes up more room on the screen. Because of the lack of the large info screen of the front panel, you now have to cycle through with the remotes "Display" button to find out the same info the HM-DH30K offered up front such as remaining time on tape, the time and counter. To use SVHS-ET mode, this item must be changed in the setup menu rather than the simple button

chillexistence - (10/11/2006) There is no counter on the display, front of the unit, only counter appears on the TV Screen. There is no way to have a counter displaying while your fast forwarding, only while the tape is stopped or playing at normal speed. Cannot stop a timer recording while its in progress. Unable to select which channel it outputs to, it only outputs to channel 3, there’s no channel 3/4 switch on the back of the unit. There is no up and down channel select for the channel that VCR is turned to on the unit of the VCR, can only change the channel via the remote control. There is no eject button on the remote. Difficult to set up a single non-VCR Plus recording, there’s a different button for each thing on the remote, which is rather weird, like Very difficult to review list of schedule recordings, can only view one at a time. The unit is constantly displaying play, video calibration during playback, making it difficult to record something without the on screen notices constantly displaying. S-Video output is dark compared to that of the regular RCA output. My overall experience with this VCR sucked, I spent the extra money to buy two of these units, thinking that they were high end, and after being told by JVC tech that it would do everything I had hoped (include a display counter on the unit it’s self, that of which it didn’t have), to only be sadly disappointed. I’ve been using Sony VCRs until this point and had always been happy, the quality was best, and very easy to navigate and set up, but these JVCs were the biggest pieces of crap, they were returned within a couple of days, and I ended up buying some older Sony models on eBay, since apparently the newer Sony models are lacking the basic features that their original models are. Although this supports S-VHS and Super VHS ET, I wasn’t able to notice the quality, and the problem is that not many other VCRs support this so if this unit would break you would be stuck with tapes with stuff on them that you couldn’t watch. I’d stay as far away from JVC VCRs as possible, they are poorly built and the basic features just aren’t there, let alone that the unit hardly weighs anything, so you start to wonder what’s inside them…

lenny644 - (09/16/2006) My past VCR experience has been with Sony and Panasonic. In comparison to the JVC they seem to be more user friendly. I purchased a JVC because it was the only one I found that had the S-Video connections. Although this does not compare to Component and HDMI connections, at least it's not a Composite connection. As others have stated, it's made of plastic which is a big difference from my old Sony SLV-900HF. I don't like the fact that the VCR's front panel display does not show the tape counter, only the time and channel. The remote control isn't anything to brag about. I have to hold-in the TV button while adjusting the volume and changing the channels on my Samsung TV. Didn't have to do that with the Sony or Panasonic remotes. On the positive side: SO FAR IT WORKS OK. It’s Super VHS (Who really cares with recordable DVD) and it is small enough to fit on my TV stand shelves.

Adaminchicago - (09/02/2006) It gets the job done. The flying erase head is decent but not as clean as it should be. The record button on the remote doesn't work for some reason. But aside from that, it's a solid machine for playback of old VHS tapes, and if you really need to record on VHS (or SVHS) it does a nice job.