Samsung DVD-V8500 DVD/VCR Combo
OK DVD, so-so VCR
My parents bought this combo unit, and I have gotten a chance to use it fairly extensively. I wanted to use it to transfer some old VHS tapes into the computer, so they let me borrow it for a week. I already have a DVD player, so I mostly concentrated on the VCR functionality. It did appear to play DVDs just fine, and I watched one or two without incident. I went out and purchased a Turtle Beach Video Advantage PCI so I could do the data transfer into the computer, and hooked everything up last night. Before this I watched some of the tapes to see what the quality was like and if I should bother with trying to back up that particular tape. Here are my thoughts on the unit: <br /> <br />Pausing and unpausing takes too long. It cuts the sound as soon as you hit pause on the remote, but it actually takes a few seconds to start pausing the playback. This means that whenever you pause, you miss three or four seconds of audio, and the only way to hear it is to rewind the tape a bit. <br /> <br />Furthermore, there is no slow fast forward/rewind. You can't pause it and then back up slowly to the point where the audio cut out, you have to do it as a normal rewind, which is approximately the speed of light. It's easy to overshoot and end up watching a minute or more of commercials or stuff you've already seen. <br /> <br />The auto tracking function is good, and I was amazed at the quality of the playbacks on most of the tapes, all of which were recorded off TV from the late 80s to mid 90s. However, there's a tracking bar that appears on the screen when you first put in the tape, and it usually takes several seconds to find the best track.  <br /> <br />On some of the tapes I also noticed an irritating switch between normal audio and hi-fi, which caused the sound to fluctuate wildly and a (HI-FI) logo to appear right in the middle of the screen. This seemed to happen the most when theme songs were playing or the tape had been fast forwarded or rewound. Half the theme song would play quietly, then the logo would come on the screen for a full 10 seconds or so and the music would be blasting. <br /> <br />I returned the unit to my parents after I had transferred some of the tapes, and I'll probably be getting my own combo unit soon. But it won't be this one. There's just too many irritating niggles on the VCR portion.