I purchased this item through Amazon on 9-29-2009.

It must be a discontinued model because after it failed, I called Philips Support and they said they would replace it with a similar model since they no longer have any more of that model. It failed to Play the VHS tape even though it would record on it. I played it on another machine that proved that. Play back just died completely for tape. The DVD worked fine.

Then they called me later and said there was no similar model so they were going to refund my money less shipping. I sent them a copy of the Amazon order with all the information. They were going to send shipping labels by UPS arriving in 4 or 5 days. That
time past, so I e-mailed them and they said they made a mistake, said it should have been 1 or 2 weeks. That went by and nothing again. I called them again and she said she reordered the labels and sent me information about returning the product. Still waiting for a result from UPS to pick it up.

This machine has a great playback picture and works very well with my other components. You could pay twice the price for other combo units and by lucky to get anywhere close to the quality.

great unit-great recorder-had unit for lest then a year no trouble yet but must get the right brand of blank dvds to record to(see the manual for recommended disc)the only issue i had with the manual was it was xerox copy of the manual not he real manual from the fac..the unit i bought came from a refurbish vendor..overall i'm very happy i bought this unit...so far

The only question I have is never answered clearly. Will this unit record one program while you're watching something else on the tv, or is it going to record the same thing that's on the screen? Only my old VCRs, which have all died except for one (and it's about to), would do this. Everything I've looked at in the past few years, even with its own tuner, records whatever is on the tv screen. That makes the unit totally useless to me, as I'm one of four people in the house and we all watch different programs. It's beyond frustrating when I think I've taped something, only to find I actually have an hour of someone's channel surfing! And I can't just buy one machine after another, only to find they all do the same thing (I already have two that I can't use).

When hooked up the television cable, the picture quality became poor. After recording, watching it, the quality worse. Very difficult to program. Am replacing it ASAP.