RCA VR623HF - A good HiFi VCR, but not a feature bonanza
Oct 10 '00
Why I bought it
I have a DVD player for movies and a Tivo for television watching. I bought a VCR because I have some videos that aren't going to be released on DVD anytime soon, and I wanted to watch them. (Specifically some music videos and muppet movies.)
I was looking for a HiFi VCR that was cheap. HiFi was important because I want stereo sound and Dolby surround. I don't want all the speakers in my 5.1 setup playing the same channel of mono audio.
Recording is a plus, as it is occasionally nice to offline things from the Tivo that I'd like to watch again in the future. If you have a Sony Tivo, you're better off getting a Sony VCR, as the Sony Tivo supports one-touch 'archival' of programs, saving you some very tedious steps.
I got mine for ~$80 from buy.com.
The Features
(bullet points from RCA's website, but broken out)
It's a 4-Head HiFi VCR. 4-Heads is as low as it goes for HiFi. My dad has a 6-Head HiFi, and frankly I don't really notice a difference. Unless you are stoutly against DVD's, then I advocate putting the money you'd put into additional heads into a better DVD player.
It shows the time! This may sound stupid, but none of the other equipment in my A/V stack show the time. Especially when I'm watching a Tivo and so have no feedback from the tv of what time it is, it's really nice to be able to look over and see what time it is. It's trivial, but cute.
It automatically can set the clock. This does nothing for me because I haven't provided the VCR with a cable feed and don't intend to. The auto-clock setting is done by looking in the vertical blanking interval of PBS stations. If you don't provide the VCR with cable or an antenna feed, it's not going to be able to automatically set the time.
Automatic Head Cleaning System. I take this for granted in modern VCR's.
Front Audio/Video Input Jacks. A nice touch for those of us who are quickly finding that we're running out of A/V jacks. My VCR eats up a precious set of jacks on my receiver, and this set of A/V jacks allows me to do some stupid wiring when I do run out. Realistically, this is extremely useful for plugging your camcorder into and recording your home movies. There's no hassle bigger than trying to plug cables into the back of A/V equipment, and there's nothing uglier than plugging cables in and then leaving them there so you don't have to do it. Front jacks are the answer and a very good feature.
Unified TV/VCR Remote. I rant about this below. Basically, it's nothing special and a bit annoying.
VHS Index Search System. A cute feature. Every time you record something, the VCR leaves a mark on the tape at the start of the recording. Later, you just hit the "search" button on the remote to seek to the next mark on the tape. So if you record 6 episodes of the simpsons on a tape, then when you want to watch the third one, hit the search button 3 times (assuming you're at the beginning.) This button also doubles as a 30-second 'jump-forward-in-time' button, for the purpose of skipping commercials.
Misc Cruft:
Auto Repeat.
ShowSaver™ Memory Protection.
Pro-Tect Plus™ (Child Lock).
Trilingual On-Screen Menus.
Auto Daylight Savings Adjustment.
On-Screen Real-Time Counter.
The missing features (that I don't care about):
VCR Plus. I don't care about this because I have a Tivo. If you don't have a Tivo, I'd recommend getting one instead of getting a VCR with VCR plus. Check the epinions articles on tivo/replaytv for more information. (Basically, the Tivo provides functionality equivalent to VCRplus on steroids.)
Commercial Advance. If you tell an RCA VCR with commercial advance to record a program, it does some post-processing where it tries to analyze where the commercials are and flags them so you don't have to watch the commercials. Again, if you have a Tivo or replaytv, you can happily hop around to your heart's delight. If you archive any programming to the VCR, the commercials will still be there, but because it's not a pre-scheduled event (unless you go through a lot of hassle), you won't get to use this functionality then either. Note that this model's search button also doubles as a 30-second jump button as well (just like in replaytv, except slower because there's physical fast forwarding involved), so it's not like you're left in the cold with commercials.
Movie Advance. Other RCA VCR's also have this functionality, which tries to locate the actual beginning of a movie, skipping all the previews and ads that modern VHS rentals/purchases have. Again, I'm a DVD guy, so this is pretty much irrelevant for me, although I agree it is a nice feature. (On the other hand, I'm not sure how well this one works.)
The Remote
RCA has always made attractive, ergonomic remotes, and the one that comes with the VCR is no exception. However, RCA made some odd trade-offs with this remote. The remote is designed to act as a multi-function remote for TV and VCR. But RCA has taken the realization that most people never bother to look up the code for their brand of TV or how to punch it in a bit too far. There are no codes for you to punch in to make the remote work with your TV. If you don't have an RCA TV, you're out of luck. If it doesn't work with your RCA TV, you're out of luck.
Although I don't have a problem with the remote being unable to control my TV, I do have a problem with the remote being designed primarily to be a multifunction remote. The set of buttons that your fingers gravitate to on the remote is a set of round North-South/East-West buttons that form a circle and remind you of a nintendo game pad. These buttons deal with changing channels (up/down) and changing the volume (left/right). Reverse/Play/Forward and Record/Stop/Pause are placed above the quad, with Reverse/Play/Forward having shapes that suggest their behavior. My problem with this setup is that as a Tivo user, my fingers are drawn to the volume/channel buttons rather than the actual tape playback buttons.
Basically, I would prefer a remote control that focuses primarily on controlling the VCR. It's nice that it can control a few TV's. It's nice that it helps the VCR perform tasks that I'll never use it for (tuning). But I'd really just like it to let me watch my movies without re-learning the remote's layout whenever I want to watch a movie.
Should you get one
It's really really cheap. It's HiFi.
The issue is whether you want a VCR with more features. If, like me, you already have other devices which fulfill your primary movie-watching and tv-watching needs, then you probably don't need any more features. You just need something that can record and play. In that case, this is the VCR for you. Again, if you're a DVD luddite, you should probably look for a 'higher end' VCR with the commercial advance and movie advance features. They're not that much more, and will be useful to you. (They'd just be annoying to me.)
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Epinions.com ID:
Sombrero
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Member: Andrew Sutherland
Location: Cambridge, MA
Reviews written: 6
Trusted by: 1 member
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