JVC DR-MX1

Advantages Edit out the commercials
Disadvantages Dense manual, poor menus, etc

...The combo states it will record anything from the HDD to either VHS or DVD. Not strictly true. If your TV channels come digitally by cable or satellite this machine is not for you. Any digital sourced material can only be recorded in VR mode (incompatible with most DVD players and some other similar combos) on to DVD-RW discs only. The only workaround is to record to another VCR and then to this making the VHS deck a useless accessory. Some other brands have the same limitations. If you want to keep the recorded quality (mbps) you can only burn a maximum of 8 programs to a DVD. more than 8 and you have to accept a much lower quality. My HDD went sour after 3 weeks of use and was in the service center for 3 weeks. There is no easy short cut switching between HDD, VHS and DVD - you have to exit all menus (often 3 or 4 steps) before you... Read review

Advantages Everything in one package
Disadvantages The manual is useless.

...and replace them all with DVD versions. So this all led to the idea of getting a DVD recorder/VHS combi. Next decision was which one. I'm not very technologically minded and found that many of the words baffled me. Also I had no idea what certain abbreviations meant. I spent a whole day trawling through internet sites, finding out what I could about various products, what they offered etc, and what all the jargon meant. I looked around for reviews but found only one on this product. It had been written by PC World, and gave it top marks. But I did come across several reviews on similar JVC products saying how many problems they had. However we were impressed with it's specs so decided to take the chance. What does it do? ****************** As I said I do not understand all the jargon. All sites selling the product will give you full... Read review

Advantages auto dub of whole vhs tape to hard drive
Disadvantages unreliable unpredictable

.../DVD/HDD option and now they are ALLunavailable. Dubbing a complete VHS tape to HDD worked ok but trying to dub just part of a VHS tape was uncontrollable/unpredictable ie unreliable and often failed and I tried to avoid doing this.... Then dubbing from HDD to DVD - worked ok for about 100 discs - then started to play up. It would spontaneously shut down. Finally today I was deleting a few programmes on the HDD it crashed frequently and finally would not boot up. I now power on and it says LOADING and goes no further. I removed DVD drive makes no difference. Put DVD back and remove Diamond Maxtor HDD in case it was corrupted - still says LOADING. will not power up any more So an expensive failure just out of warranty. I will NEVER EVER buy JVC again both my MV1 and MX1 are a waste of money.... Read review