JVC DRMH20

...The DR-MH20 is described by JVC as a "Stylish DVD recorder with a built in 80 GB hard disk drive to revolutionise your TV and recording routine" and is at the bottom of JVCs Hard Drive recorder line up, with the DR-MH30 and DR-MH50 both improving on the specifications of the MH20, the most notable of which is the hard drive size which increases to 160GB on the MH30 and a whopping 250GB on the MH50.

However, price is obviously ...
...this is available from the JVC website and any place that sells the machine so I don't need to rehash the stats here. What you really want to know is: is it any good? It wasn't that long ago that VCR's were selling for £260 so is it worth the dough?

In a sentence: oh yes it is and then some!

Having said that, it's not without its issues (I think the word 'problems' is too harsh in this case - so I'll stick with 'issues'). ... more

Ok, if you're reading this then the chances are you're already interested in a Hard Drive/DVD Recorder, so I won't bore you with the benefits of this over a standard DVD recorder: they should be obvious, instead I'll get straight to the review.

The DR-MH20 is described by JVC as a "Stylish DVD recorder with a built in 80 GB hard disk drive to revolutionise your TV and recording routine" and is at the bottom of JVCs Hard Drive recorder line up, with the DR-MH30 and DR-MH50 both improving on the specifications of the MH20, the most notable of which is the hard drive size which increases to 160GB on the MH30 and a whopping 250GB on the MH50.

However, price is obviously a factor and in looking for a VCR replacement, I certainly wasn't going to pay well in excess of £300 for the two superior models, and at around £260 the MH20 met the first of my criteria: it wasn't going to break the bank.

So, what do you get for your money?

Well, there's a definite wow factor at work as you slide this from it's box, with it's silver finish and sleek appearance. Plug it in and there's a second wow when the fascia starts to glow a very, very striking blue. So 10/10 for aesthetics. Internally there's an 80 Gigabyte Hard Drive which can hold up to 136 hours of recorded material (more on this later), and naturally, the DVD drive itself which will write to DVD-RAM, DVD-RW and DVD-R. (Note: DVD+R and DVD+RW is NOT supported) and playback pretty much anything you care to throw at it, including CD, SVCD, VCD, and MP3/JPEG (though DivX and Xvid support are notable omissions). Someone told me you could play back DVD+RW and DVD+R on this machine, but it's not a documented feature and I've never tried so feel free to experiment. It's also worth mentioning at this stage that I can't locate any region hack for this machine and I'm not paying for a mod - so for the time being it's stuck on Region 2 - this will be an issue for all those that like to import cheap Region 1's but as usual, such a hack/mod would void the warranty. Them's the breaks.

Connection wise there's: Dual SCART Connectors; Front AV Input; Component and S-Video outputs; Front L/R audio outputs and Audio Digital Output both Optical and Coaxial... blah, blah blah - All of this is available from the JVC website and any place that sells the machine so I don't need to rehash the stats here. What you really want to know is: is it any good? It wasn't that long ago that VCR's were selling for £260 so is it worth the dough?

In a sentence: oh yes it is and then some!

Having said that, it's not without its issues (I think the word 'problems' is too harsh in this case - so I'll stick with 'issues'). First off, there's a 91 page manual (and it's all in English folks - it's not one of those multi-language jobs). Make sure you've got plenty of time to read it - and don't kid yourself that you can wing it here - you WILL have to read it. Once you've got the hang of it (and the user guide is very easy to follow) you'll find using the MH20 is a dawdle, it's getting the hang of it that's a bit tricky. There are a lot of menus, set up options and terminology to get to grips with (I'd never used the word 'dubbing' in serious conversation before). That said, work slowly and methodically and you'll have the thing running to your satisfaction in a few hours.

Now, I've already said the User Guide is well written (and it is) but there is an issue that had me turning the air blue till I figured this out and I'm going to share this with you so you don't have your family running for cover. It concerns Freeview. If you don't have Freeview you might want to skip this paragraph. When you first switch the MH20 on (and assuming you've got all the connections in correctly) it will automatically tune itself to the terrestrial analogue signals in your area. This is great, so-much-so that when it's done it's thing and sprung to life for the first time all the analogue channels are there waiting to be recorded. Unfortunately, this is not the case with Freeview. And whilst it would be a lie to say Freeview wasn't mentioned in the user guide, it is fair to say it only gets a passing mention and not particularly informative. I'm not even sure if my solution is the correct one (it's not according to the JVC website), but it works. I manually edited the channels by adding a 6th, calling it "free", and crucially, set the decoder setting to "on" - having initially set the L2 input to "decoder" in another part of set-up. This soon had digital TV up and running but not after a whole lot of effing and blinding. Reading that it might seem obvious but believe me, it wasn't, especially when I wasn't familiar with the menus. Because I don't watch analogue TV anymore, this set up means that I just keep the MH20 tuned to my newly created channel 6 and it will record whatever digital channel the decoder is tuned to. Because of this (and I know I'm not alone here) I'm giving serious thought to buying another decoder - one for the TV and one attached to the MH20 so that I can record one channel whilst I watch another. Bit of a step back there, but something we have to live with until decoders are incorporated as standard. Satellite and cable users seem to have more extensive coverage and shouldn't encounter the same problems.

Ok, so now I have crystal clear digital TV running through the MH20. What's the recording quality like? Well, there are 5 quality settings for recording: XP (Best), SP, LP, EP and finally FR(with various increments). If you record everything on the XP setting, you'll get 17 hours on your 80GB drive and so on until, at FR480 you can get 136 hours. Having tested all the recording settings, I couldn't see a great difference between XP, SP and LP so I've stuck with SP which means I can get up to 34hours on the drive and the quality is just fine - it's as good as the original broadcast (laws of compression mean it obviously isn't but I can't tell the difference and that's what's important). However, cranking the setting way down to FR480... well, I can't see why you would want to - the picture is horribly pixilated and well, just awful - so bad in fact I don't know why they've gone to the trouble of leaving it there. Anyway, you'll want to play with this and because you can delete at will from the hard drive you can experiment to your heart's content.

All the menus are very straightforward - once you find out what they do! Try to find anything in the user guide about trimming a recording on the HDD and you'll struggle but the feature is there, buried in the edit menu. That's a great feature to have if you set a timer to record a programme (which is simplicity in itself incidentally) as you can "trim" the excess at the beginning and end so you're just left with the programme you want and not the detritus at either side (what's really lacking is a "stitch" function so you can "trim" out adverts and stitch the program back together again).

You can record straight to DVD, if the feeling takes you but I can't see why you would want to, it's so easy to record to the HDD, trim it, then burn... sorry "dub" to DVD, that you would need a really good reason to record any other way. Once you've dubbed your DVD, you need to "finalise" it so it can be played in other DVD players, and this is done via the set-up menu's (seems a bit out of the way) and here one can choose from some colorful backgrounds before you finalise your creation. I've not had any problem playing back the DVD-R's created in other DVD players including my PC and my Playstation 2 - I'm led to understand DVD-R is the more compatible of the format's (I've no intention of using DVD-RAM) and this purchase puts me firmly in the "DVD-R is the best" camp for no other reason than it works everywhere I want it to.

Wanting to test as much as I could, I've hooked up a VCR to the L2 scart input (remembering to change the setting from "decoder" to "video", and transferred some old home movies to the HDD - this worked a treat and was ridiculously simple: start recording to the HDD, press play on the VCR, wait until movie is finished; stop recording; press stop on VCR - bingo! job's a good 'un. That can then be dubbed to as many DVD's as you want safe in the knowledge that there's been no sacrifice of quality in the conversion.

One thing that I still mess up is in the choosing of DVD or HDD from the remote control. If you are playing a DVD you have to remember to press the DVD button on the remote so that the DVD functions work. If you want to watch or record something on the HDD you have to remember to press the HDD button. It all gets a bit confusing when you're frantically pressing the eject button and nothing is happening! It's a small niggle and someone not so addled as I might not find it an issue - and in fairness, there's probably not a better way of distinguishing between the two.

Two more issues I want to raise before I return from whence I came:

I've had this unit for about 2 months now and in that time it's seized on me twice. And when I say seized, I mean seized - as in screen frozen, no activity, have to switch off at the wall type seize. The user guide says that if there's a malfunction you should press and hold the power button and stop button for 5 seconds. This didn't work for me and I found that I only got it back after leaving it unplugged for 5 minutes. With a HDD in there, I'm not particularly happy about having to switch it off at the wall while it's still on, albeit unresponsive - after all, doing something like that in a PC can corrupt the HDD and I'd wager this unit is the same. However, this isn't an issue unique to this device - indeed it seems to be fast becoming a standard setting on all modern electronics. All the same, I'd be interested to here if other users have the same issues.

Finally, and I really am scraping the barrel here mainly because I'm 99% certain this is a cable issue and nothing to do with the unit, I have noticed a very slight ghosting when the MH20 is switch on, i.e. watching any Freeview channel - reception is crystal clear, switch MH20 on and the same channel comes through it but with a very slight ghosting. I'm putting this down to shoddy cables (only the French could invent such a ridiculous socket as the scart!) and will invest in some quality scarts - hopefully that will fix it. Even then, it's only faint and I really have to look for it.

There's more - so much more that I could wax lyrical about: the joys of the timer programming menu, the simplicity of the menu's themselves - even the fact that the remote can work limited aspects of my Sony TV (volume, channel), not to mention the live memory dubbing feature and the ability to play something from the HDD while you record something else and the terrific picture quality. But for these and a plethora of other features, I'll leave you wanting. Let me be absolutely candid about this: I've just found a retailer selling this model for £251.00 - If you want to join us in the 21st century, then at that price you just can't go wrong. It's a damn, damn good piece of kit and blows the socks of the VCR it was bought to replace, even considering these issues. Stylish? Very. Has it revolutionised my TV and recording routine? Yes. Can't say fairer than that.

 

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