| JVC HM-DH40000U D-VHS Player |
|
|
| Tuesday, 01 March 2005 | |
|
Page 1 of 3
Introduction I
remember one glorious day in the early 1980s when my dad and I traveled
to the local shopping mall in Echelon, New Jersey in search of some new
electronic gadgets. The store in the mall was called Video Concepts and
it was like a surreal playground for a nine-year-old. My dad, in his
mid-30s, seemed to be having some fun, too. He turned the event into a
shopping spree of epic proportions. We bought a fold-down big-screen
TV, an Intellivision game station, a good dozen games and a VHS
videotape recorder that resembled something the military would use to
record Soviet spy activity. With movies costing a mere $100 per, we
picked out some classics but rented even more. I can remember the
salesman suggesting that this VCR was built to last a lifetime – even
at nine, that seemed like a long time.21 years later, VCRs have finally given way to the DVD player as the preferred way of playing back movies in the home theater environment. In the past five-plus years, the DVD format has launched itself to superstardom in the world of audio/video, but for home theater enthusiasts with the latest DTV sets it has one terrible flaw – no HDTV playback. Much like the corner crack dealer, today’s home theater salesperson knows that once you get your plasma, LCD or rear-projection HD set home, you will be transfixed and drooling over the picture. The problem is that there is a limited quantity of content available on in HD. D-VHS This is where JVC’s D-VHS technology comes in. Using a hot-rodded version of the VHS technology, this deck can play back movies and content from a VHS tape in top HDTV formats, including most notably 720p and 1080i. This is a welcome addition to many a top home theater. Being able to watch HDTV on your time schedule was something that, up until Dish Network and DirecTV finally released their HD-DVRs, was damn near impossible. The JVC HM-DH40000U is a $999 (retail) digital HDTV-capable VCR. As $99 non-HDTV VCRs clutter the shelves of every half-assed electronics retailer in America, you might ask yourself, why do you need such an expensive VCR? The main reason is the ability to play back uncompressed, striking-looking HDTV on your home theater with beaming 5.1 surround sound and a picture that will knock you dead in your tracks. Another reason harks back to that trip to Video Concepts in the Echelon Mall – this very likely is the last VCR you will ever buy. Many people have a lot of movies and special events, some hard or impossible to find, that hold tremendous personal value: home videos on VHS, wedding videos, classic sporting events recorded from TV. The list goes on, but the most compelling reason to own a D-VHS deck is to play back HDTV on your home theater system. Recording I didn’t spend a tremendous amount of time recording with my JVC HM-DH40000U, because I use a DirecTV HD-TiVo unit (about $1,000 retail) to record most of what I watch, using the snazzy TiVo interface. You can record HD content on a HM-DH40000U onto a top-quality tape if you have a terrestrial antenna feed going into the D-VHS recorder. Most DVRs do not allow non-encrypted HDTV output. The one that did allow an HDTV output was the first-generation Dish Network HD receiver. A small cult of HDTV fanatics recorded everything they could get their hands on until the day Dish rendered each of those sets useless, replacing them with Dish’s HD-DVR. Recording with the JVC HM-DH40000U is basically as simply as recording with a traditional VCR. The onscreen menu is needed to access a number of prompts. It is definitely harder to use than TiVo and, with the limited streams of content that can come into your recorder, I found recording on the JVC HM-DH40000U wasn’t anywhere near the reason I bought the unit. I would guess that people with HD camcorders might find a use for a D-VHS recorder to archive their home videos and play them back in their theaters. |
