Samsung VR8460 VHS / S-VHS playback VCR

Pros: price, overall performance
Cons: none

The Samsung vr8460 is easy to hook up and easy to use.
Picture quality is decent and stable sound is good.The
auto tracker does a great job even on 10 year old tapes
recorded on a horrible old 2-head machine! Contrary to
other reviews this vcr does playback on ch.3 but for better
quality use the a/v inputs.This unit is hard to beat for the price!

Pros: Great picture and features at a low price.
Cons: Must use A/V connectors to view on your TV (not necessarily a bad thing)

The VR8460 VCR by Samsung is a great VCR for the money. The picture is crisp, auto-tracking tracks even my worst tapes, and it's a nice compact unit.

The trick is that to watch a VCR tape, you MUST connect the A/V output jacks on the VCR to your A/V input jacks on your TV. No more watching your VCR on channel 3. It does have 2 standard RF coaxial connectors ANT IN and TO TV, but the signal passes right through the VCR to your TV. This means that your TV will always pick up any channel it is tuned to as if the VCR was not there. You must switch your TV to A/V INPUT or AUX INPUT or whatever your TV manufacturer calls the A/V in jacks.

Not that this is a problem - we've known for years that the picture through the A/V jacks is far superior to the one through the RF (Channel 3). This may cause some confusion with older people who are used to the "old ways" of using channel 3 to watch their VCR.

Pros: Great picture and sound, the best tracking system and features in it's class.
Cons: One would have to get very picky to find any.

I have a collection of 1100 movies on VHS I taped over the past 5 years. I made the mistake of taping several movies on a tape in SLP mode. When your VCR wears out, as two of mine have done, the new one will not play the tapes as well. I tried two other popular and more expensive VCRs and took them back. The RCA and the Sony just would not track on auto or manual well enough for me to transfer the movies to DVD. I finally tried the Samsung and it worked like a charm. Not all of my tapes were salvageable, as the older ones were still too noisy to reproduce, but I was able to salvage the latter half or more that were done on better VHS tapes. I learned a hard lesson on VCR and VHS compatibility. The Samsung has a good auto track and a great manual tracking system that works very well. It is the best in its class.