We'll Never Leave the House Again
Written: Aug 23 '01 (Updated Nov 25 '01)
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Pros: Superior quality, cost- and space-effective all-in-one machine.
Cons: It won't do the dishes.
The Bottom Line: The Go Video DVR 4000 is a fabulous synergistic fusion of very high quality DVD and VCR players that anyone who loves cinema can not afford to pass up.
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| shortstack27's Full Review: Rio DVR5000 DVD Player |
Please Note: This review is of the GoVideo DVR4000 model, not the 5000. I apologise for misplacing it, but I don't know how to move it now.
In the Beginning
We encountered the Go Video DVR 4000 DVD-VCR Combo in a time of grave woe. Our trusty VCR, after several years of loyal service, had passed on to the great entertainment center in the sky.
We were shuffling through Costco and noticed this machine nestled amidst the hifi VCRs and the flashy new DVD players displayed on the warehouse shelving. We were enticed by the evident versatility of the thing. How novel to simultaneously please the kids, with their beloved videos encapsulating favorite worlds of Elmo and Blue's Clues, as well as the gadget-crazed adults, seething for more technology -- digital quality, deleted scenes, movies with menus, no more rewinding!
For a week we mulled and considered and shopped around a bit for one component or the other. We had some concerns: we never heard of Go Video or their parent company Sensory Science, and didn't know if they were reputable, and we were mildly concerned that if one part broke the whole thing would break and no one would fix it and, because it was a hybrid, that no one would know how. We decided we'd go for it, because having both things in one machine seemed too convenient and worthwhile to pass up.
The First Date
The minute we got home with our new toy, my husband rushed to set it up. The connections were pretty standard, according to him, and very easy to deal with. The setup instructions are very clearly printed in an at-a-glance way on a separate sheet of paper, as well as in the main manual, as well as on the inner flaps of the box.
The way our system is set up, we play the TV through the VCR, now DVR, and hook the sound from the DVR up through our stereo for optimal sound and reception. We don't subscribe to cable, but I imagine the power antenna occupies similar space in the hooking-up department. All of the components fit together very easily and quickly and soon we were ready for phase two of our setup process: the Auto Setup. This was so easy! you just set the language you want for your setup, connect the antenna (which we already did at this point) and press menu. The thing searched for all the valid local channels, which I expected, but then it set the clock itself! It even set it absolutely accurately. We were quite amazed at this bit of magic, and later I found out that the machine found a local channel and read the time from that (which is still pretty amazing, I think).
The setup took a few minutes, and I admit I got a little worried, but when the setup was over, everything was ready to go. The remote is very self-explanatory. It's an attractive design, and the buttons clearly state what each is for. There is, for those with fancy satellite dish cable access, a button for channels over 100. There are also several features that are fun to play with and enhance your movie watching experience. Just a few that really impressed me:
-on DVDs that offer the feature, you can use the angle button to view a scene from a different angle (I guess a lot of new DVD players have this button now).
-there is the 3D sound button which promises to "create the illusion of surround sound with only two speakers", and in our experience seems to do just that -- it's really quite amazing.
We bought "The Matrix" to test out our new machine. My husband, a sci-fi action geek, has seen the movie probably more than ten times, and this time he was amazed at the quality and the detail of the sound and picture. The Dolby Digital sound practically left us breathless in a very movie-theater way.
The image, on this particular DVD, was ultra-wide wide screen. I used to think that in a lot of movies wide screen isn't a big deal -- nice, but unnecessary: the ends of desks, the rest of a person's face, the other people in the crowd, a generally better-cropped better-looking picture, but not necessary. Now that we have the capacity to see it all the time, however. I don't know how I ever lived without it. Films are more complete. More whole. More fulfilling. I am now able to see the movies as they were intended by the director to be seen. Experience what I'm supposed to experience, become entirely enveloped in a separate world as completely as I'm allowed. How did I ever enjoy movies at home without the DVD?
The Honeymoon
The next day I plugged in one of my daughter's favorite, worn old VHS tapes for her to watch. This particular tape is a copy of another, taped off of an ancient, two-head VCR. Offhandedly I noticed that this tape I had listened to and watched so often suddenly revealed new sounds. They weren't anything really stunning or miraculous, but they were little background noises that were blended and muffled on other VCRs. We watched one of her newer videos, and I realized that the picture quality is really great-- definitely above what I'd expect from a lowly VCR. I was amazed at the quality of sound and picture. I would have expected all else to look like rubble after experiencing our new DVD player. My husband agreed that this is actually the best VCR we've ever owned, and he even went as far as to say it was better in quality than my in-laws' new VCR, which is a top-of-the line hifi deal also.
Thumbing through the manual I found a great kid-related detail that will definitely come in handy in our house: toddler-proof front panel. We can lock all the buttons on the machine and hide the remote, and that's one less disaster to worry about.
Later that day we tried out the CD-playing feature, and it worked. It works as well as any other CD player I suppose, but there's really not much special about it as such, except maybe that you can play a CD while recording a show off the TV, which we have not tried.
We tried to play some of our MP3 CDs that we burned on our PC's writer, but we could not get them to play. My husband says that he could probably arrange the formatting to be able to play MP3's that we burn, but as of now we haven't tried that.
Another thing we haven't tried is copying DVDs to VHS tapes. I understand some people have trouble doing this and are upset because they can't due to copyright encoding. This machine clearly states in the manual that it can't copy DVDs with this encoding. In some of my attempts in the past I've found that a lot of modern VHS tapes are also made impossible to copy from tape to tape.
We have also not tried to record any TV shows (see update). This machine is supposed to be capable of being programmed to record with the VCR Plus codes, which sounds really great and convenient to me. Another neat feature the VCR has is "Complete Program Record" which promises to "Automatically Adjust Tape Speed So You Don't Miss the End of Your Recorded TV Show." Again, we haven't tried this out, but it sounds great.
Enduring Love
As I found out at www.govideo.com, this company has actually been manufacturing dual deck VHS machines for over ten years now with much success, so I'm pretty confident that we can look forward to a long life with our wonderful new electronic appliance. We found a service online that rents us DVDs in the mail with free postage called Netflix (www.netflix.com), so if we didn't have to work and get groceries, we'd probably never leave the house, at least for a few months.
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UPDATE: 11/25/01
I finally found the update button on this review. I swear it wasn't there for some time and then it reappeared, but that may have been my imagination.
At any rate, in the months that my husband and I have owned our wonderful new toy, a few things have come up.
**The first thing: the DVD player's memory fills up if it is left on all the time. We learned this after all our DVDs seemed to be skipping, and we realized we never turn the player off. Like a computer it needs to be rebooted sometimes so it can continue to function smoothly (duh, you might say, but some things get by the smartest of people).
**The second tidbit is likely a more common issue. An Epinions reader pointed out that there is a misprint in the operations manual regarding the Timer Recording feature. Everything seems to go smoothly until step 10 (view event summary) when the machine starts ignoring your instructions. Upon calling the Sensory Science toll free number, I found out on a recorded message that in fact once one has scheduled all the information for the thing they wish to record, instead of the SETUP/ENTER button, one must press the RETURN button in step 10 to "confirm the event and view a summary of all programmed events." Later in the same step I found also that the RETURN button is again used in place of the SETUP/ENTER button to exit the programming screen.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 279.99
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Epinions.com ID:
shortstack27
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Location: Tucson, Arizona
Reviews written: 10
Trusted by: 3 members
About Me:
Age quod agis.
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