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I have recorded hundreds of hours of TV shows and it works wonderfully and is pretty easy to set up if you consult with the manual first. I have been playing rented discs lately which tend to be pretty scratchy, so that might be the reason.
I really like the VCR plus feature. Recently I have noticed that the DVD player has been making a strange noise while playing discs.
I have owned this unit for close to 2 years and have been mostly satisfied with it. Once in a while it will freeze for a second during playback, but usually it just does it once or twice if at all, not that noticeable.
I had to return the first one I had after just a week or so as the VCR would start to loose tracking after an hour or so. The replacement works much better, however I notice some excessive noise from some tapes (usually ones recorded on other VCR's).
I really wish it were black instead of silver.
I wanted to consolidate the VCR space and get something that would load discs faster; one out of two ain't bad. This thing loads discs slower than a 5-6-year-old Sony DVD player, slower than a 'cheaper' brand competitor, and can't play many discs that other units & computers can. I bought this unit to replace one of Sony's first DVD players, old enough to have a DIVX phone jack. I still love my Bravia LCD, but the next media player that gets plugged into it sure isn't gonna be a Sony.
Making viewing impossible.4) Hitting eject, and many other buttons, seem to have a huge lag between hitting the button-- and it doing anything. And in the menu, often what the menu items are don't map to the remote buttons.6) Often rewind of a VHS tape literally goes at the same speed as playing the tape.
Hit 'eject' or 'play' and it might be a minute before the player acknowledges you hit a button. This is a different issue than item 2 above.5) The remote in not intuitive.
This product seemed to be a very good for us feature wise. Meaning that the speed at which it rewinds is normal play rate.
But, basic usage of this item can be very frustrating. Here are a few reasons:1) Loading of CD's and DVD's seems to take forever.2) Hitting 'next' button had very long lag between starting to go to the next item, and it getting to the next item.3) The VHS player has tracking issues with many tapes (even new ones out of the box).
I simply cannot believe this is actually a Sony product.
It's very unintuitive.We donated our old no-name DVD and VCR when we "upgraded" to this fancy all-in-one, but we would give anything to have them back again. And when you're playing a tape and you press rewind to go back to something you missed, it stops and goes to a blue screen. All of the buttons have slow response times. They took up more space, but at least they worked. You can't watch it rewind.
The remote is problematic too--you have to press "Play" to make a selection because the "Enter" button doesn't do anything at all. And when you're playing a CD, it takes forever to advance from one track to the next. We were sucked in by the brand name and great price but have had problems with this "Sony" from day one. The VCR has tracking issues with every tape we own--tapes that work fine on other VCR players. I can see by the reviews that some people lucked out and got machines that worked.
For example, it takes forever to eject a disk. I wouldn't risk it if I were you.
The DVD player does a decent enough job, but it's nothing special. One really stupid thing, mentioned in another review, is that the VCR and DVD sections don't share the S-Video output, so I have to run two separate connections to the TV. I bought this for our church, as a companion to a new video projector. Dumb. Isn't that why you buy a combo deck in the first place. It's ok, but the VCR is pretty sad: it has a hard time with some older tapes that play just fine in a $40 no-name VCR. To eliminate extra wires.Given the chance to do it over, I would buy separate components.
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