
Short of expectations

This was the second unit I had bought, the first was faulty on receipt and sent back. This unit in use now was also faulty so I fixed it using a local repair shop. The requirement is to have a hard disc video recorder to replace an existing Panasonic DVD recorder. The idea was to eliminate the need to have loads of DVD RAM discs around the place each of which needed labelling etc and were prone to damage. The hard disk, hopefully being of DOS standard would allow the type of facilities currently enjoyed such as play back chase and concurrent record and playback of different programs. The video source is a FreeSat box. Locally we don't have Freeview. The current analogue signals for channel BBC1, BBC2, ITV and Channel 4 are poor.
The Panasonic responds to program start and stop signals sent by the program distributer (I assume for SKY+ purposes). The JVC will only respond to SKY box being turned on and off by the signal. This means the the SkyBox cannot be "on" for other purposes. As soon as the SkyBox is turned on for whatever reason, the JVC will start recording if it is set in that mode. This sounds trivial but in practice it can be annoying.
The RF output does not appear to have a tuned signal. This means that device cannot be used with a RF only receiver. If you want to use RF to distribute the signal over a RF network, you will need to use a secondary device to encode the signal to RF. The JVC website offers no options, the instructions say that the JVC needs a SCART connection to use the device. This implies no RF output even though there is a RF socket for loop through.
When recording using the signal from the FreeSat box, no access can be made of any previous recording without going out of this mode and into standard mode. This can be done and simultanious recording record and playback can be done. However when recording disk dubbing ( copying from HDD to DVD ) cannot be done.
The quality of recording to HDD and DVD is excellent. Fast dubbing is good sometimes depending on the recieving disk type and mode.
The device is fundamentally good but next time I'll get a Panasonic. The user interface is better and more logical. And Panasonic seem to understand what a user might want to do with their equipment.
Review ID: 10000000008975925

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