Very VERY Disappointing

It is so bad I can't believe it, and have tried every adjustment, and read and re-read the instructions, certain it must be me. But no. The picture quality is appalling. I mean truly dreadful. The remote has an irritating delay of a couple of seconds, so when you press a channel button, although the number comes up on the tv screen, seconds go by before it switches over - very strange. The number on the screen says 2 but I'm still watching 1...um... tum ti tum...oops! there it goes (at last). Recording quality on LP is abysmal with 1/4 of the picture at the bottom of the screen lost to crackling and flashing the whole time and dreadful picture quality. It's slightly better behaved on SP, but still very poor reproduction, and if I'd wanted a machine that only did SP I'd have dug my old old one out of the attic. I'm using an expensive gold plated scart lead, and TDK tapes that have never given any problems with my old VCR. My previous VCR was a 'cheap' Ferguson that recorded with no loss of quality at SP and LP speeds (through the aerial!). (I even tried that - ie without the scart lead - however back to front it seemed, but actually it made no difference; no better, but in fact no worse either.) I bought this from Amazon just after Christmas on the basis of one reasonable review. Silly me. Very VERY disappointed.

High quality solution

I bought this because it seemed to be the lowest cost DVD recorder/VHS combo with a proper SCART RGB input for recording from a Freeview box, rather than the bleary composite found on cheaper machines. It turns out to work extremely well. Slim, high quality construction, very easy to set up, easy and logical to use once you've practiced a couple of times - combo machines are never going to be altogether simple because of all the possible permutations. VHS replay quality is absolutely excellent, and it has several DVD record modes giving up to 6 hours per disk. Only niggle is that it takes a bit of time to read a DVD after insertion. Only issue may turn out to be multi-region functionality (none). Direct VHS tape copying feature works fine, and I like the FireWire direct input from my camcorder, too. Very happy indeed with this purchase.