Toshiba W712 Hi-Fi VCR
Old Faithful
I bought this VCR in September of 2001 when my last Phillips VCR froze up on me and I couldn't get it to work again.  I bought the Toshibia to complement my Toshiba DVD I had bought several months previous.  I record several TV shows a week on it (still haven't broken down and bought the digital recorder) and I've only had a couple of problems with it after 18 months.  I use the VCR+ feature and it works wonderfully because it's so accurate and I don't have to remind myself to set for the program every week.  The quality of the recording and the viewing of all tapes is excellent.  A previous reviewer commented on the fact that the advance through commercials is too fast, but it actually has two speeds of advance and the slower of the two works very well to zip through commercials.<br />The reason I couldn't give it 5 stars is that it is a bit confusing to set up at first and the instruction booklet is not as detailed as it could be for helps.  Also, for some reason whenever we go on Daylight Savings time, the VCR moves the time ahead by two hours instead of just one.  Appearently the mechanism that determines the timezone when you plug it into the cable has trouble recognizing it, so I had to turn off the feature to mannually set the time.<br />Other than that, I've been very pleased and given the circumstances, I would probably buy the same player again.