JVC HRS4600U Super VHS Hi-Fi VCR
Fine picture quality; great value
I've owned the JVC HRS4600U S-VHS-HiFi VCR for 7 months now.  I'm very happy with it overall.  It has very high picture and sound quality for its  price in each speed and mode.  S-VHS, of course, is quite good if your TV  or monitor has an S-video connector and if you can find and are willing to  pay the premium price for blank S-VHS videotapes.  But almost as good as  S-VHS is the JVC's S-VHS-ET mode, which uses *standard* VHS tapes to make  visibly higher resolution videos than are recorded in standard VHS.  This  is a very nice feature if you have a high-quality TV or video monitor and a  strong, clean video signal to record.  The only caveat is that S-VHS or  S-VHS-ET recorded videotapes have to be played on other VCRs so equipped, a  problem only if one might be playing videotapes made in either of these  modes in other VCRs that don't have S-VHS or S-VHS-ET.  The picture quality  of this VCR on tapes recorded on it in standard VHS, which of course play  in any VHS VCR, is a bit better than I'm used to in either speed from the  similarly priced Sony VHS VCR I owned previously.  <br />The remote is very  well laid out.  I don't miss a jog shuttle wheel, on either remote or deck;  I prefer button controls to jog shuttle wheels, anyway. I have *not* had  any problem as another user reported here playing commercially prerecorded  videos, and I use this VCR a lot for that.  This same reviewer complained  that when editing videotape from a camcorder, there is a delay in this VCR  coming off pause into record mode.  In my experience, this delay is between  one-half a second and one second, normal and consistent enough that one can  learn to compensate for it.  (My understanding is that this delay is a  function generally of the VHS design of tape transport, unlike the  faster-responding-off-record-pause Beta VCRs.  My camcorder-tape-editing  Sony VHS VCR did the same thing.)  I've also never had a problem loading a  videocassette, or with jitter in pause, as another reviewer here reported.   I've not had any problems requiring service at all.  My nits to pick:  programming this VCR to record a tape at a later time could be more  intuitive (so what else is new?); once you figure it out and practice it a  few times, though, it's easy and quick enough.  I also miss the (hardly  ever seen, anymore) option of being able to manually set uncompressed sound  levels on videotape, a pitfall when recording music or dialogue with a wide  dynamic range.  And this VCR and its remote will not operate the  digital-cable-TV decoder (General Instruments Starfone) used here for  AT&amp;T digital cable, so this cable box has to be left on with one  correct channel, manually set, when I program this VCR to record cable TV;  the manual says this VCR operates other (older?) GI cable boxes.  But these  are minor nits.  I would buy this VCR again.