LG DVC8700

Author's product rating:   

Picture Playback	Satisfactory
Sound Level	Good
Range of Features	Excellent
Durability	Poor
Value for Money	Poor

Advantages:	Good DVD player
Disadvantages:	VCR is poor

Recommend to potential buyers:

no

Full review

This was my first exposure to the LG brand name. I bought this little DVD/VCR combo in the hope it would solve my problems with having to have a VCR player, despite the whole world now on dvd!

The model I have is silver and looks the part and was so easy to install!

As you can guess it can be rated on two things: VCR or DVD

Lets look at the DVD side first. It i capable of playing back almost any DVD disk you throw at it. It can play DVD +/- and can cope withmany formats well mp3, wma, jpeg vcd and svcd. I havent found a dsik yet that it cant play.

The operation of the DVD player is fine with an option to skip through at fast rates as high as 24 x. The combo also as the option of a one button dvd to vcr copy which can be useful.

The sound playback is fine and no noticeable problems have occurred.

Looking at the Video side of the unit. Two words sum this up.oh why! The video on the face of it should be really good. 6 head (4 picture 2 sound) nicam digital sound and lp/sp playback. However the video is on the poor side. It often struggles to playback my tapes which other vcrs will play fine. Its auto tracking feature seems to only rectify the problem 50% of the time. On a plus note it has an automatic head cleaning system in built and tape doctor. This seems to fix playback problems 90% of the time. It is a shame since the VCR is packed full of functions timer record, pdc,index skipping and has the usual connections such as scarts. The video component is really let down by the quality of playback.

The remote is rather strange and keys seem to be placed randomly at odd points, so again not really happy

The price of this unit was good, but now i know why!

On the whole I would avoid this system.