dissapointing

Well, what does the vr550 have, well it does have 6 heads and 2 scarts, but apart from that very little of any use. NO videoplus, still by far the easist, fastest way of recording, NO one touch record, so you cant set it in 1/2 hr blocks. it does however have something called a"Turbo Timer" to use this you have to first set the advance time, 1 minuit at a time only via the R/C, then the recording length, again 1 minuit at a time- so to set it ,say 3hrs in advance for say 1 hr takes a luicrous 240 pushes of the R/c in other words you might just as well set it manually. NO front socket for camcorder, NO rear audio sockets either, LP recording is also poor. what a pity AIWA no longer make VHS recorders, ther arnt many left, so dont get stuck with this one.

No fast forward when viewing AVI/DivX movies

One killer feature this recorder has is DivX playback, which in my mind makes it different from the usual supermarket combos. But unfortunatly you cannot fast forward when you are viewing an AVI/DivX movie!!!

You would be better off with one from Asda!

This could be Sanyo

Having previously owned a sanyo dvd recorder I could not help noticing that some of the worst features of the Sanyo has been taken over by Philips. The machine so far has been ok although I am not happy with the fact that it does not give you an option regarding initializing discs which will mean that in time it will not instantly recognise an already recorded disc and go straight into initialising thereby erasing a dvd.
Like the Sanyo this machine will not allow you to record on any disc that has already been recorded on another machine. The disc menu only shows three titles at a time, again just like Sanyo, but the most annoying feature shared with the Sanyo is the lack of any display in the video mode as to how much recording time is left on a tape,A feature that was standard on the later VCR machines.There was one feature that surprised me and that was the fact that it was not possible to pause recording in dubbing mode, but then i discovered by trial and error that the append disc feature works in the dubbing mode on this machine, which at last is a plus NOT Like the Sanyo.