Sylvania DVC860D DVD/VCR Combo
poorly made, poorly designed
My girlfriend and I purchased this product from a local electronics store in August, 2003 and the laser stopped tracking yesterday. The unit was not dropped or jarred in any way-- the thing just stopped working. <BR>I wasn't terribly happy with it to begin with; the built-in interface isn't very good, so if the remote control gets broken or lost there's no way to access a lot of the machine's features, which is always a red flag to me. The DVD scanning features were also kind of lame. It fast forwards at various speeds, but there's no obvious way to skip chapters. And the layout of the buttons on the remote is counterintuitive. <BR>We bought the unit because it seemed like a cheap way to satisfy our VCR/DVD needs. But once we had the thing out of the box it was obvious that it wasn't very well made. Frankly I was completely unsurprised when the laser started skipping all over and playing back random chapters and pieces of DVDs.<BR>If you just want something that kind of works, go ahead and take your chances with one of these. If it doesn't just stop working, it's adequate for most purposes. But if you're actually excited about DVD technology and like the idea of having a good DVD player, buy something else.