Price Paid:  $75.00

Summary:
response to nov 25 '99 review by jeff martinson....

you must just have bad luck, or be using worn or poor quality tapes, or a child that squirts cheese whiz in the tape door or something....

mine has performed without a twitch of trouble for 3&1/2 years now; use it for major timer recording, not much for video rentals anymore since dvd took over; was so impressed i sought out another on ebay, and would only accept a 3500; not a 3600,3800,4500 all essentially newer versions of the same unit.
finally found a mint 3500, paid less than $100 on ebay shipping included, and it performs exactly like my 1st one, that being "perfectly".
i could switch locations of the vcrs from main ent ctr to bedroom and eventually lose track of which one i bought 1st, they perform so identically.

Strengths:
picture quality, dependability, ease of use, major bang for the $$$.

Weaknesses:
none

Similar Products Used:
jvc hrs 6200u, jvc hrs 4700u, mits u53

Price Paid:  $180.00 from Ubid

Summary:
This is for the HRS-3600. I have had JVC's best the 9600 for about a year and it is just a hair better than my Toshiba S-VHS VCR. Picture quality has always been very critical to me, I have had S-VHS VCRs and laserdisc players for more than ten years. I bought the 3600 because we have four TVs in the house and the only place I could play the S-VHS tapes was on the best AV setup (the Toshiba is hooked up to the JVC 9600 for dubbing). I didn't feel it was worth over a thousand dollars for two or three more 9600s so I decided to give this machine a try. I first had it hooked to a pitiful excuse for a TV a Panasonic superflat. It has very low resolution, on DSS it makes white foggy areas over the places where it can't reproduce the fine details(the high video frequencies of the input has exceeded the TV's bandwidth). So when I popped in a S-VHS tape it exhibited this phenomenom, but was the TVs fault. I next moved the 3600 to a five year old 27" Hitachi, a much better set. The picture improved of course. Then I did the real test. I hooked it up to my main TV, a one year old 36" Hitachi UXB to do an A-B comparison against the JVC 9600. I inspected three S-VHS recordings in several different kinds of scenes. The difference was definitely there, the 9600 having just a little better detail, but it did not make the 3600 look terrible by any means. The difference was there but not huge, just enough to notice. What surprised me the most was that both machines had virtually no noticeable video noise which shows up as spots of a different color in a field that you know should be another color.

Some people have remarked that the ET mode is over-rated. It is true that the S-VHS picture recorded on a VHS tape is only slightly better than a regular VHS recording. But it is still better and the tape didn't cost you any extra, so it's not a huge improvement, but it is still an improvement and remember we are talking about a $200 machine.

I became an electrical engineer for this very purpose, to continue to bring good products to market that make the average person's life a little nicer. This doesn't always happen because of the corporate execs who would rather sell you bull$h!t and rip you off, but sometimes we sneek one by them.

So if you want the ultimate recorded picture from DSS or
DVD, get the 9600 for about $400. Or settle for slightly less and get two of the 3600s.

I haven't tested the Toshiba W808 S-VHS VCR with ET, but I would suspect that is at least as good as the JVC 3600 and probably a little better. I have owned several Toshiba video products and they are always top-rate. It is about $250.

Strengths:
Excellent value for a less than $200 unit, extremely low video noise.

Weaknesses:
None really for this price.

Similar Products Used:
Toshiba top-of-the-line S-VHS, JVC HRS-9600 S-VHS, Canon's best VHS, some Hitachis.

Price Paid:  $299.00 from Sears

Summary:
I bought one for my parents over a year ago. They've been recently having a lot of problems with it.

Strengths:
Excellent EP playback, Split-Video Connections.

Weaknesses:
Grainy Picture, No Sharpness Control, Blochy Reds, Only Average Tracking, No Tracking By Remote, Only Average Sound.

Similar Products Used:
Sony, High End JVC.

Price Paid:  $300.00 from Furniture/home electronics/etc. store

Summary:
This purchase originally stemmed from a broken TV, which I replaced with a (lovely) "extra inch wide" Samsung. Since it has S-video connectors, and my old VCR didn't, I decided to get a new VCR with S-video to replace my close-to-retirement unit.

This was the only model I could find under US$700 that came with S-video connectors, so I decided to give it a shot.

My initial impression was favourable, since it was able to control my StarChoice DSS box, and the picture quality from the DSS routed through the VCR using S-video was exceptional (playback of VHS and SVHS tapes, though, was and is only average quality, even when recorded from digital sources).

I very quickly discovered some of the problems I listed in the "Weaknesses" entry above, such as its noisiness, slowness, lack of jog, and flimsy transport (which requires some force to be exerted before it will accept a tape, and makes the kind of "I'm about to break" noises that do nothing to inspire confidence in the quality of manufacturing).

The first real problem occurred after about a month of use. It would accept a tape and begin playback, but any attempt to rewind, fast forward, pause, etc., would result in the tape being ejected. The remote simply did not function at all, and the power button on the front did nothing.

I took the machine back to the store and exchanged it for an identical model, which functioned for about six months, at which point it began exhibiting behaviour noted by one of the other reviewers - namely that every other tape would be accepted only halfway into the transport where it would stick, leaving the back end of the tape flash with the front of the VCR. The VCR would then turn itself off.

On this occasion I opened up the machine myself to take a look, and found that a catch in the transport mechanism had become stuck. Upon freeing the catch the VCR functioned as properly as it ever had for around another five months - just long enough for the warranty to expire.

Two weeks ago the first problem I experienced - playback fine but anything else causing an eject - reoccurred. This time I decided to unplug the machine for some time, as is recommended these days when anything out of the ordinary happens to electronic equipment.

When I plugged it back in after a few hours, the machine did absolutely nothing, giving all appearances of being completely dead. I took it to a technician who ripped it apart and reset the CPU, which fixed the problem. The technician told me he services more JVCs than any other manufacturer.

By this point I was fairly disillusioned with the thing, but thought it would give me at least another few months of use, at which point I would video myself in the garden smashing it with a hammer and send the tape to JVC along with a note describing my experiences, and then buy a new VCR.

Lo and behold, this very morning, the problem has recurred yet again. It will play inserted tapes, but will not do anything else - identical to what happened two weeks ago, and what happened a few months after I bought it.

I now know that a trip to the technician and CDN$25 will fix the problem in an hour, but for how long?

To sum up, this has to be one of the worst pieces of electronics I've ever had the misfortune of buying, and was certainly not worth even the low sum that I paid for it. I've owned JVC equipment once in the past - a British VCR that functioned for a year and a half before giving up the ghost - but will never again buy anything else they've had their hands on.

My advice: Avoid JVC like the plague. As always, there's a reason they're so cheap.

Strengths:
Cheap, reasonable picture quality, S-video connectors

Weaknesses:
Noisy, slow rewind/"fast" forward, no jog on remote, flimsy transport, exceptionally unreliable

Similar Products Used:
All kinds of VCRs, from basic home models to high-end professional editing models

Price Paid:  $200.00

Summary:
I've purchased two JVC VCR's over the past several years
and I have had problems with both. It seems JVR's quality
assurance is extremely poor. I would look for other brands
if looking to purchase a VCR

Strengths:
None