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From: km@emory.UUCP (Ken Mandelberg)
Newsgroups: net.video
Subject: Top of the line VHS
Message-ID: <1418@emory.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 24-Oct-84 10:18:45 EDT
Article-I.D.: emory.1418
Posted: Wed Oct 24 10:18:45 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 25-Oct-84 04:08:27 EDT
Organization: Math & Computer Science, Emory University, Atlanta
Lines: 64

My 6 year old VHS machine finally broke down, so
I went shopping for a replacement. If I stay with
VHS, I want HIFI. I also record almost everything
using the timer, so the programming features are
important to me.

The first machine I looked at was the new RCA VKT700
in the dimensia series. It has 5 heads, VHS-HIFI, and
on screen programming. The demo tape looked ok,
but it was recorded in 2 hour mode. However, when I
did some test recording at 4 and 6 hours speeds, I
was surprised at the poor quality. The 6 hour speed
looked very bad. The 4 hour speed was somewhat better
but the special effects work badly at that speed
(including visual fast scan).

I am used to using 4 hour mode (the slowest speed
on my old machine) for time shift. The quality of
these recordings was not as good as the original
if you do a real A/B test, but good enough to confuse
with the original from memory. The 6 hour recording
on the new RCA could not be confused with the
original, no matter how bad your memory is.

I hate to give up the on screen programming, but I
guess I should look at the other top of the line
recorders. Any comments on the competition would
be appreciated. In particular, are any of the 6 hour
recordings any better? Perhaps a reasonable choice
is the Panasonic Tech 4 line (like the 1730), where
the special effects in 4 hour mode should be better.

By the way, I think the plus of on screen programming
for the RCA is basically that it is remote. I am
amazed at how little intelligence they have built
into the programming system itself. Given that they
have gone to the menu interface, another K of rom
and ram could have added a lot of nice features.
How much trouble would it be to:

1) Allow the user to enter a description field on each
program, so he could remember what it is when
the programming is summarized.

2) Allow more than 8 programs to be stored, with a
facility  to  activate and deactivate entries without
reentering them. 

3) Provide a "weekday only" frequency.

4) Allow the user to define a mapping between channel
names and numbers, so the user didn't have to rememeber
the 60+ channel numbers on a fancy  cable system.



Ken Mandelberg
Emory University
Dept of Math and CS
Atlanta, Ga 30322

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