Panasonic PV-9662 4 Head Hi-Fi Stereo VCR
Written: Sep 07 '00 (Updated May 06 '02)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Excellent image quality/reliability and ease of use, good price, nice convenience features
Cons: Battery backup, looks?
The Bottom Line: The looks of VCR itself could be better though and the battery backup time should be extended. But overall this model is a great buy
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| dkozin's Full Review: Panasonic PV-9662 VCR |
Panasonic PV-9662 is 4-head Hi-Fi VCR, it adds Movie and Commercial Advance to the set of features that 9661 has.
4 video heads allow you to have excellent slow motion and still modes, and be able to use three speeds: SP – standard play (fits 2 hours of recording on a standard T-120 tape), LP – long play (4 hours) and SLP/EP – super long play/extended play (6 hours).
As the amount of time you can fit on one tape increases, the image quality decreases, so use SLP for programs that do not require best possible quality. I use SLP for majority of my recordings, since my cable TV is already noisy by itself. SLP allows me to fit 6 hours of Formula One racing on one T-120 tape (4 races).
And this VCR provides excellent video quality, even in this lowest SLP mode, where the image clarity heavily depends on the quality of the tape.
I have had Panasonic VCRs for more than 15 years and they always were reliable - never broke although I used them every day. For some time I have heavily used my Panasonic SD-11 for video replication and it survived this kind of abuse easily. The picture quality always was great also.
PV-9662 is excellent. It is inexpensive (remember the time when VCR cost a fortune?) and reliable. The sound quality is wonderful (I use it with my Dolby Pro Logic "Home Theatre") - in fact all Hi-Fi VCRs have sound of CD quality, since they use 2 heads for sound that rotate along with video heads, providing high relative tape speed and the higher the speed, the better the sound.
The auto head cleaning is useful when watching a lot of borrowed or rented tapes. I read an article about choosing a VCR in “Consumer Reports” where they say that automatic head cleaning is useless and that VCRs worked fine thousands of hours without cleaning. I think, if you watch old and/or rented tapes, the magnetic particles will separate from the tape and it is nice to have an automatic cleaner; in any case it will not hurt and doesn’t cost much.
The pause is crisp and stable; the VCR has a V-Lock buttons on the remote to adjust the V-Lock settings and remove unwanted image shaking during the still and slow motion modes. The rewind is fast.
It is also easy to use and program. Although it does not have flying erase head and Jog/Shuttle control - it is easy to edit home movies just by using Pause button! The front Audio/Video inputs are also helpful. It has illuminated remote control and helpful Movie/Commercial advance, tape position display. It also automatically adjusts time using radio signals.
Panasonic VCRs have very high ratings for both reliability and picture quality, according to "Consumer Reports" magazine. Reliability wise they hold top position among other brands (see Consumer Reports Buying Guide 2000, page 37).
Moreover, the previous model, Panasonic PV-8662 earned "Consumer Reports Best Buy" rating from "Consumer Reports" magazine for its combination of picture quality in both SP and LP modes, ease of use, price and reliability.
This model has index search capability and also "timestamp" - it records the time and channel when you start recording. When you start playback of this segment, this information appears on the screen for about 3 seconds (if you want to, you can disable this feature).
There are two modes of index search. One allows you specify the number of index "marks" to skip (for example you can skip to the beginning of the previous recording by pressing "Index", "2", "Rewind").
If you performed timer recording, you can search for the beginning of the program you recorded using the menu. You choose the program to search for from the menu and the VCR will rewind (or FF) to the beginning of that program (make sure you don't eject the tape before searching this way, it will not search after that since VCR doesn't know what tape you insert; the regular index search will work though).
The remote has intuitive button layout and is easy to operate, unlike some other brands there is no need to point it directly to VCR. The up/down/left/right buttons for menu control and other functions are located in an intuitive manner and are quite large.
Illuminated buttons are useful when you want to control your devices in the dark. The remote also allows you to control TVs, cable boxes and DVD players of almost any manufacturers. However, the functionality is limited – for example, the “menu” button does not always work.
The front panel does not have buttons to control menus or program VCR. It has power, channel up, channel down, stop/eject, play, ff, rew, rec, tv/vcr buttons and 3 RCA jacks – composite video in, audio left and audio right channels.
Back panel has 6 RCA jacks – video in and out, audio L in and out, audio R in and out. It also has RF/cable in and out, power cord (of course) and a switch that allows you to choose channel 3 or 4 if you were to use the RF out to send VCR’s signal to TV.
There are two ways to connect the VCR to TV: RF (you connect it to your TV’s RF input and select channel 3 or 4 on the TV) and composite video (Video RCA jack, you connect it to your TV’s composite video input and push tv/vcr button on TV). The latter provides better image quality and is easier to use.
The setup is almost completely automatic – the VCR scans for available channels and determines the current time and date automatically. After power outages, it also automatically sets the date and time. Very nice feature.
The looks of VCR itself could be better though and the battery backup time should be extended. But overall this model is a great buy, it will last many years and provide very good picture and sound quality for a very reasonable price.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
dkozin
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 in Electronics |
 - Top 10 |
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Location: California
Reviews written: 849
Trusted by: 523 members
About Me:
I love to push buttons on electronic (audio and video) equipment. It makes me happy.
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