This model is discontinued as of this writing, but I thought I should warn anyone off who is thinking about buying a used/refurbished one.

This was one of the earliest DVD/VCR combo units on the market. It's a nice looking player, if a bit chunky (it's 8.5 inches in height).

I won't go too deep into the specs, as that can be found GoVideo's website (they let you download the specs and user manual) and I think my time here would be better spent telling you about my experience with the unit.

All I WILL say about the specs is that it has all the connections available that we needed to funnel our Tivo signal through this unit and to the television; we also are able to output the audio signal to our stereo system via RCA connectors.

My parents owned this same model and were pleased with its performance, so I decided to buy one of my own. It was very pricey, and unfortunately new models at much lower prices were just around the corner, but I didn't know at the time.

First impressions:

- Setup was easy, although the feature that supposedly automatically sets time and date never seems to work. I have to set time and date manually.

- Audio and video performance while playing DVDs is clear and sharp.

- The remote is a little cluttered but I've seen far worse and it's definitely not too hard to adjust to.

- The VCR picture is very good and it's got a nice fast rewind.



After a while of use:

- The remote uses the same button for two functions: hold it down to fast-forward the DVD, and press it once to skip to the next chapter. However, it's way too easy to accidentally skip a chapter when you're trying to forward. It happens to my wife and I frequently.

- The DVD player is extremely sensitive to scratched or dirty disks. I use Netflix and easily half or more of the disks end up freezing, skipping, pixellating, and so forth. Sometimes cleaning the disk helps, sometimes not. In almost every single case, putting the DVD in my Powerbook computer player worked fine and did not skip a single time. It's become common practice when watching a movie for my wife and I to eject a disk from the GoVideo player when it skips, put it in the laptop to watch that segment of the movie, then put the disk back in the GoVideo to continue watching. Very annoying!

- The DVD player does not handle DVD-R well. When I burn a DVD and play it on this player, it skips all over the place. The specs on this model don't mention DVD-R at all, so I guess I can't say this is a "defect" -- but my parents' GoVideo unit of the exact same model plays DVD-Rs quite well. This hints to me that quality control is not consistent between units of the same model! Or perhaps we got a lemon. However, the 90-day warranty wasn't long enough to narrow down these problems specifically enough to make a case for warranty repair or replacement!

- We've been trying to play audio CDs (commercial ones, not CD-Rs) but the player only plays some of them; with over half of our commercial CDs, we just get a "cannot read disk" error. Unacceptable!

Conclusion? We're replacing this combo unit and putting this one on our small "spare room" television. It still works well enough to keep for occasional use, but its performance has never been what I would call acceptable. I do not recommend this model and, if it's any indication of what else GoVideo has produced, I do not recommend this brand in general.

Recommended:
No

Amount Paid (US$): 280