I tried copying a recent release (Shallow Hal) using the copy feature. You are not supposed to be able to copy movies, because they are supposed to be protected by Macrovision. It did copy at first, but the copying stopped after about 30 minutes. I restarted copying, and it stopped again after about 10 minutes. Then I tried copying the last hour of the movie, which it did. My kid was watching the movie at the time, and I don't know if she had anything to do with the copying stopping at times.The quality of the copy was very good. I don't know if I could tell the difference from the original.
Another complaint about the remote: It doesn't have a last channel button (so you can easily flip back and forth between two channels).
The display on the units isn't great. It normally just shows time of day. You can't get the display to switch between modes. It does have a very complete on screen display. The only problem with the on screen display, is that it comes on any time you do anything with the remote, like change channel, stop a tape, at the end of fast forwarding, etc. Also, the unit does not have a time remaining on the tape display.
This is a dual deck that in most cases is better than having 2 individual decks. Copying tapes is really easy. You just press one button on the front of the deck. The quality of the first copy is pretty good. But, once you start making copies of copies, quality goes down with each generation. On a copy of a copy, the color starts to bleed and there are ghost images.
According to the manual, this deck will not copy tapes protected by Marcovision. I am guessing that most new commericial tapes have Macrovision, but I don't know for sure. I have only tried one commercial tape, and had no trouble copying it. But, I am guessing it won't do new movies.
This unit has automatic commercial skip. Using the left side deck (it doesn't work on the right side), you record a program as normal. When the program is finished recording, the deck rewinds the tape and comes back and marks each commercial. When you play back the tape, the deck automatically fast fowards through the commericials. The TV screen turns blue and it takes about 20 seconds to fast foward through a block of eommercials. I don't know how it recognizes the commercials. It isn't perfect at recognizing the commercials. It does it about 80% of the time. I had only one incident, where it marked the middle of a show as a commercial.
You can also make a commercial free copy of a show. You put blank tapes in both slots. The show, with commercials is recorded on the left side. Then the deck transfers the show to the right side, skipping the commercials. I haven't tried it yet, but there will probably some reduction in video quality.
With this system, you can record on one side while watching a tape on the other side. You can also record two different things at the same time, if you have the proper connections. The deck has only one tuner, so you can only record one show off of the antenna or cable at a time. But, if you have a separate tuner, such as from a dish system, or cable box, plugged into the auxiliary video, you can record off that, while recording off of the antenna/cable hook up.
The deck has very nice "special effects". It does freeze frame very well. The remote control has a very nice jog shuttle for slowing stepping through frames either forward or backward. It rewinds and fast forwards very fast. But, the fast scan is fairly slow, and you have to continually hold down the fast forward button to get maximum speed.
The remote control is OK, but it doesn't have a last channel button. The play key on my remote sticks down everytime I press it.
The menus on this thing are very complicated. It is quite an effort to program the deck for recording. It is very confusing and you need to refer to the manual a number of times before you get used to it. I have made mistakes in programming it a number of times.
The programming software has a bug in it. It will sometimes incorrectly tell you that there is a conflict in the programming when you set the VCR to program record two different programs at the same time, but using the two different decks and two different video sources.
For the price, you can buy two separate VCR's with better features. But, you don't get the commercial skip or the easy copy feature. Also, the dual deck is easier to connect to your TV and takes up less space. If I had to replace this unit, I would probably buy another instead of buying two separate decks.
