Home > Consumer Reviews > JVC HRJ692U 4-Head Hi-Fi VCR , Black

... compared to the awful reviews it's gotten here on quality and durability. I fully expect mine to break and I just hope it does within 30 days so that Best Buy will make good on it.

1. The 90/90 warranty speaks for itself. Best Buy's price ticket on the display model indicated 30/1yr which is bad enough and obviously false.

2. The machine is not stereo if you simply use the easy Ant.In and TV-Out wire. Turns out that gives you monaural. If you buy a triple wire for AudioLeft, AudioRight and Video. Then you get stereo. However, if you want to record something while you're watching a different program, you also have to have the monaural video out wire. So ... if you thought you might enjoy life without an A-B switch, you won't.

3. My 3 year-old JVC VCR still works fine, the reason I bought this one. But, they not only "dumbed it down" as others here have said, but there's no Channel 3/4 output switch. That's set manually in the firmware and is lost in a power outage. Certainly not a good feature for an older person who has trouble with electronics items to begin with.

4. JVC even cheapened the owner's manual. My older JVC's was bound like a book. This one is a huge foldout, exactly like a road map. It's a pain finding your way from one page to the next and will eventually fray and fall apart like road maps do. From what I've read here that's probably not going to happen since the map will likely outlast the machine.

Why did I give this 3-stars? Mine is 12 hours old and didn't break yet. Also it was manufactured more recently than many of the others criticized here, so I can at least hope against hope it won't break. Am really sorry I didn't scout the reviews here first.

I bought this VCR as a replacement for an 8 yr-old RCA that was starting to have problems with playback. The price was right and the JVC brand had a good reputation as far as I knew. Despite the good to excellent video recording quality, I have to give this product two stars and I'm returning it for the following reasons.

- The sound from recorded shows is very tinny, to the point of being distracting.

- The fast forward and rewind functions display static over most of the video, making it hard to see when the commercial ends and the show begins so you often wind up going too far forward or back.

- The pause has the same video problem as fast forward. It just doesn't show a clear picture.

- For most functions, the VCR has no feedback of the current status on the LED display. All status information is displayed on-screen, which means you don't know what operation is currently selected unless the TV/VCR mode is switched in.

- The timer programming interface is fairly easy to use but makes it unnecessarily slow to set up the programs. I could program my old RCA in a quarter of the time.

Unfortunately I just can't recommend this product.

I wanted to get a better than average VCR & was attracted by the Pro-cision 19u EP Heads, which are supposed to make EP recordings look better. I soon found it lacks the rewind to zero feature our old Panasonic has, allowing one to rewind to where the counter reads zero. The worst was yet to come, & I was lucky to find out before the 30-day deadline to return for a refund. Our electricity was interrupted for a split-second, & the JVC lost all the settings I had laboriously learned to make! Our old Panasonic remembers for about 5 minutes without power. I won't try another JVC VCR!

I was perfectly pleased with this purchase for three months, but then the unit stopped working (wouldn't turn on). Nothing unusual happened - it just died. This may be an anomaly (I've never had any trouble with my other JVC electronics), but I thought it worth mentioning...

This is the absolute worst VCR that I have ever had. Extremely hard to program, no memory during a power outage and it didn't even last through 7 months of use. I thought it was the tapes at first. The picture and sound suddenly started going in and out, and I wound up watching a blue screen most of the time. The warranty may cover parts, but the labor is what costs. I can buy a brand new VCR for $40.00. Quite frankly, I will never buy another JVC product again and will encourage others not to either, unless they recall this VCR, fix the problems or refund everyone's money or give them a replacement VCR of better quality.