Home > Consumer Reviews > JVC HR-S3600U 4-Head S-VHS VCR

I bought an S-VHS unit simply to get the s-video in/out plugs. Now I can have just one wire (s-video) going to my TV. The JVC VCR has a nice feature in that when you change channels up/down, included in the list is Line-1 (where I input from my dish). So, after the highest TV channel it just goes to the dish input -- nice! I don't need the TV remote except to turn the thing on. Also, any time I want to play a tape, I just put in a tape and run it and it just takes over the TV picture. The instructions were not clear on the 'plug/play' hookup. It didn't seem to be working but I left it alone for a while and it was OK. It just needed to find the time signal from my local PBS station which is only sent once per hour -- I hope that's helpful. I haven't tried it with an S-VHS tape. A complaint I have is that when useing S-VHS ET with a regular VHS tape, there is no indicator that shows the quality that it allowed itself to record at. One could argue that one could just observe the tape, post recording. However, I'd like to try a tape to see if that important movie will record on *that* tape in a high quality.

Unit started ejecting tapes. Sent it away for warranty service. Four weeks later got it back -- still broken. Took a week to get a response from JVC. Sending it back again. I wonder how long it will take this time. I wonder if they'll fix it.

When it worked, it was great. Now it's a doorstop, four months after purchasing it -- 5 weeks of which has been down time. Thanks, JVC.

We have had our JVC VCR for 1.5 yrs. Three weeks ago, the power just completely blew out. Since we spent a little more for what we thought was a good VCR, we took it for repair. The repair man just called me to say that JVC has parts to repair our VCR on backorder for 2 months, and this is a sign to him that it has serious problems. He also said we spent about$280 for a $100 VCR. So needless to say, we are feeling a bit ripped off.