jabba2000's Full Review: Kenmore 3.5 cu. ft. I.E.C. Super Capacity High-Eff...
Basically I like the unit. If you don't need the HDMI connection and the SD card, get the "37" instead of the "47". The EZ475V is the same unit but with an HDMI cable. This thing comes only with a composite cable; gimme a break, who's gonna buy a $300 upconverting unit and use a composite cable. Anyway, I don't have it hooked up to a good tv yet, so I can't comment on the upconverting. Typically you don't need upconverting anyway since the TV should do it for you. So what's the good and bad: The user interaction with the unit is pretty nice, for example when you look at the things recorded on a DVD, it shows them to you along with the channel and time they were recorded, and starts playing the highlighted one in the thumbnail. I like that if you use a DVD-RAM disk (again none included) you can record a show and while it is recording, playback another show or even the one you are currently recording, while the recording is going on, in other words you can time-slip. The thing says it had a digital tuner, but if you connected it to cable, it is unlikely you will get to receive any digital channels since many cable companies scramble all digital signals even the free channels, so check with your cable company. The set-up "search for channels" functions terribly. I say this because #1 it did not capture the station names for 95% of my analog stations (it did do it for the 3-4 digital channels it could find), had to type the station names in by hand for 80 stations so I could see what station I was on while surfing or recording; #2 it captured a hundred digital channels that had nothing on them - black screen, no sound, had to go delete all of them. When trying to type in the station names, it is very annoying, for example if you had a station "WEA" you could type that in, and when you were done it would change it to "WEATHER" and you'd have to go back and remove the last 4 letters, and even when you did that, now the station name was "WEA" followed by 4 blanks, not "WEA", so on the list it is off-center.
It has a feature called Flexible Recording which means in addition to the fixed 1-hr, 2-hr, 4-hr, 8-hr per disk settings, you can tell it to fill up the remaining space on the disk with the next thing you want to record, so a 2.5 hour movie can fill a disk with an alleged quality in between 2-hr & 4-hr. I thought this would be great when copying things from VCR to DVD, but alas this feature does not work when copying from DVD, only when doing a scheduled recording off the tuner. The unit is very slow to turn on, at least 15 secs, but there is an option to use more electricity and keep the unit in a stand-by mode instead of turning off (2w vs 14w of electricity) so it will turn on in 1 sec (it says).
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