RCA VR639HF VHS VCR

I use a VCR mainly to record TV shows. I want decent picture and sound quality, but I don't care much about minor differences in picture quality, since I usually watch movies on DVD or laserdisc instead. Features that make it easier to tape and play back shows are much more important to me. I'm going to review the RCA VR639HF from that perspective.

RCA VCRs have one feature that makes watching taped shows much easier and more pleasant: commercial advance. This is not the same as the commercial skip feature found on many other VCRs, which is just a button that fast-forwards 30 seconds per press. Instead, after you record a show, the VCR goes back and marks the beginning and end of each commercial. (You can make it wait until later to mark commercials if you want to record something else right away.) When you play the tape with commercial advance turned on, you don't see the commercials. Instead, the VCR shows a blue screen for a few seconds as it fast forwards over the ads, and then the program starts up again.

Commercial advance is surprisingly reliable. In over a month of use, it has really only failed once -- the TV station left an unusually long gap between two commercials, and the VCR thought the commercials were over. It does take a moment for the audio to come back on after a commercial is skipped, which occasionally cuts off part of the first word.

Unfortunately, commercial advance doesn't work with tapes you recorded with other VCRs. I would like to be able to stick an old tape in the VCR and have it mark the commercials, but it won't do that.

Another useful feature is index search. When you put in a tape, you can tell it to skip to (for example) the third thing recorded on it. This only works well if the tape is rewound. If the tape's not rewound, you can just hit Search and then the Fast Forward or Reverse buttons to skip to the nearest index mark. Like commercial advance, index marking only works on tapes recorded on the RCA.

By pressing the record button repeatedly, you can set the VCR to record for a set time, from 15 minutes up to 4 hours, then stop automatically. This is a useful quick alternative to entering a new program if you happen to want to tape something that's on right now.

The VR639HF can store 8 programs, which can be daily, weekly, daily on weekdays only, or one-time. Ease of programming is typical of modern VCRs -- in fact, programming operation is almost identical to my old VCR, a different brand.

One thing I don't like about the VR639HF is that it has no LP (4-hour) recording speed -- only SP (2-hour) and SLP (6-hour). SP mode requires frequent tape changes, while SLP mode provides terrible quality. LP is a decent compromise for everyday recording, and its absence is a real drawback. The VR639HF does play back tapes recorded in LP mode, though.

I also dislike the use of the LCD readout. Depending on what you're doing, the same readout may show the current time, or your location on the tape in hours and minutes. It doesn't tell you which; you just have to know. Pretty annoying when you're in the fourth hour of a tape and it's around 4PM.

The VR639HF is a 4-head VCR with hi-fi stereo. The picture and sound quality are decent, but there are certainly VCRs with a better picture for the same price. I find that the differences in picture quality among VHS VCRs are minor compared to the difference between VHS and DVD, but if you watch VHS movies often and want them to look their best, you'll probably want to look at other brands. If you *really* don't care about picture and sound quality, RCA makes 2-head VCRs with commercial skip that can be found on sale for under $100.