Great VCR W612 or W627 from Toshiba

Also What to know about DVD's.

I first bought my girlfriend a W612 about a year ago.
This machine has performed very well over the last year.
It has a excellent picture quality and great sound quality.
It has basic functions, and you can control the sound
choices too. SAP, left sound or right sound or mono or
stereo to the speakers. The recording quality is great as
well, allowing recordings in sp or ep(slp). In EP(slp)
mode, the recording quality is near that of SP!! It has a
auto clock set which is really neat and also sets up
the channels when you first plug it in. The TV Tuner is
great as well, providing crystal clear tuning. Special
effects are clear and jitter free. The color output is
remarkable.

Its definitely a keeper at the $70 price paid at Costco.

Now for the W627. This model replaced the W612 at Costco.
I bought one about 8 months ago as a gift for a family
member. What I mentioned above is equally applicable here.
The remote control is a little different, offering a jog
shuttle at the bottom of the remote. Otherwise, it has
the same functions. Same setup screens, same everything!!

My 11 year old jvc, $345 dollar, just quit on me. So
I went down to Costco and bought a Toshiba W627 for $70.
After buying two Toshiba VCR's in the last year and
very pleased with the outcome, I really didn't need to
spend a lot of time with this one. The first one I bought
was defective, so I returned it and got another one. No
defects here.


***** What to know about DVD's ************

However, I thought about getting a DVD player. After
looking into getting one, I became apparent that my
tv (5 yrs old) did not have the component(3) inputs.
So the picture quality would suffer. Some tv's may need
a adapter to get the dvd player to work with the tv,
another $30 add on. Then to my surprise, the claims
of what the DVD player can play is a very gray area.
It seems after doing alot of researching, that the DVD
players differ quite a bit in replay ability. With
the small print including alot of doublespeak on replay
ability. Can play mp3, but only with the right media,
can play VCD with the right media, etc etc. It even
gets worse from there, gotta use this media with that
burning software with this encoder and on and on to
get it to play in the DVD!!!

After reading more reviews, it seems price has nothing
to do with replay ability of these DVD players. Go to
www.vcdhelp.com/dvdplayers.php to learn more on
these issues.

Finally DVD players average about 500 lines of resolution.
To get this, you must have a TV of the same resolution.
In addition you have to have those component inputs as
well. The final straw is that a new DVD player called
H-DVD is coming soon. It will offer a true 1080 lines
of resolution. The current Progressive scan DVD players
merely double the lines of resolution, but that is based
on the undoubled resolution of the player, not a true
1080 lines of resolution.

So it seems that the VCR is here to stay for those who
want to record their own stuff. It's cheap, tapes are cheap,
quality is great!! With a DVD player, you never will be
able to record your favorite event, they will become
obsolete in a couple of years due to H-DVD and the movies
you buy today will follow the same path too. There will
be newer H-DVD movie discs coming out too, rendering the
current discs blurry compared to newer H-DVD discs.

So there it is, just wanted to say what I learned about
those DVD players................

Need a VCR, Toshiba is a great choice!!

OBX001