Sony SLV-N88 4-Head Hi-Fi Stereo VCR
Not as good as its hype - and beware the clock!
I bought this unit because the reviews I'd seen online suggested it had the best picture out there.  The picture is good enough (though I haven't yet tried to play older LP tapes), but I'm not sure it's worth buying.  The only feature (not counting head quality and the like) that it has over my 10-year-old Hitachi is VCR Plus+, which requires a lot of setup to remap the stations to local cable services.  Compared to the old Hitachi, the features are generally harder to use and the menus are just as clunky.  Unlike the Hitachi, this unit cannot be set to display the current time if a tape is loaded, and its timer display options are surprisingly sparse.<br />Worst of all is the internal clock.  The time must be accurate for any programmed recording to work correctly, whether that be a VCR Plus+ recording or a manually-entered one.  In theory, this unit automatically checks its time against a broadcast time signal whenever it is turned off.  However, despite numerous attempts to use the auto-time setup, it never did find a time signal on my cable service.  It may be that there is none, despite the two good PBS stations in my area; setting the clock manually is not all that difficult.  However, the clock *loses time*.  In my latest check, it lost 21secs over 7 days.  This is not a great amount of time at once, but over the course of a full season it will play havoc with program recording.<br />The customer service people were very friendly, but since I am able to read the simplistic manual, they were useless, as their \\"technical support\\" seems to consist of people reading the manual to callers and trying to find five different ways of telling the caller to try the same thing.  In several calls, and speaking to several people in each call, I did not once get connected to a person with any degree of actual technical knowledge.  The unit is warranted on parts for one year but only 90 days for service, so I was told that to get my unit \\"fixed\\" I would have to pay $59 and they would give me a refurbished replacement.  (I neglected to see if asking for the \\"resident geek\\" might have gotten me someone more helpful.)  Their website is a textbook example of uselessness - its idea of a FAQ is to enter the \\"troubleshooting\\" options from the manual as if they are real questions.  The \\"knowledge base\\" isn't any such thing.<br />It's a shame.  This unit has a lot of promise, but it doesn't quite deliver.  The support just isn't there.  If you do elect to purchase it, compare the time to a neutral source (such as the Weather Channel) at least once a week.  It's a good enough performer, with a good picture, but do be careful.