Zenith XBV243 Dual Deck DVD-VCR Combo
Looks elegant, ease of use could be improved
Did lots of homework before buying this, and it looked like the best unit I could get within my budget. Not a bad choice, but there are some limitations.<br />First, the good news. It plays DVDs without a flaw and the quality is excellent. It plays videotapes adequately, and the quality is... well, videotape quality. It looks very elegant, with its mirrored front (though that can make the messages it displays harder to read.) It is (and this is very important to me) deliciously quiet in operation.<br />The not-so-good news concerns the set-up process and the remote. <br />Set-up can be a bear. Since I'm relatively new to TV/DVD electronics, I did RTFM. I read it religiously. Getting the initial set-up done -- all the right jacks in the right places -- wasn't *too* bad. Any difficulties were to do with my neophyte status, not the machine.<br />But setting the machine up via the remote is something of a dog's breakfast. I have tried every possible combination of buttons, new batteries, and small animal sacrifice, but no go. The manual blithely says, \\"Press MENU and the MAIN MENU will appear\\". <br />It doesn't, ninety times out of a hundred. <br />Just to keep you interested via partial reinforcement, the main menu does on occasion actually show up on screen and you can finally Do Stuff like set the date and so on. The rest of the time, the unit itself displays \\"SET-UP\\", but nothing in the way of a menu shows up on the TV screen. It makes something basic like setting the time something of a long-term hobby.<br />Second bad news is the remote. It's very small, it's laid out for the daintiest of tiny fingers, and it's not universal. If you're over thirty, you also require powerful reading glasses to decipher the labels on the buttons. In short, the remote is a lousy piece of design -- a real contrast to the elegance of the unit itself.