Be Connected - Electronics

Last weekend, I was babysitting my neighbor’s children at my house and they were dying to watch The Little Mermaid, their current Disney obsession. Sadly, I had to inform them that I own the VHS copy of the movie, but only have a DVD player in my living room. Needless to say they were disappointed, but it made me realize how much of my movie collection is stuck on VHS tapes. I decided to shop around for a DVD/VCR Combo Recorder that would work with all of my movies. I was particularly interested in the recorder combos, since these would enable me to copy my VHS tapes over to DVDs.

I really liked what the Philips DVDR3545 DVD Recorder/VCR Combo had to offer. It’s a little higher on the price scale, but has some great technology that would allow me to make the most of all of my media. It has an i-Link feature that lets you copy camcorder tapes onto DVDs, which is great for all of my childhood family videos. You can record on both DVD and VHS, and transfer videos from one to another. It also has 1080p HDMI up-conversion so it has high definition picture quality even for standard definition movies.

The Sony DVD Recorder/VCR Combo RDR-VX560 has a lot of the same features, and I figure you can’t really go wrong with a big tech name like Sony. It has “One Touch Dubbing” which allows you to transfer material from DVD to VHS and VHS to DVD with one button on the front of the system. This ease-of-use is appealing since it seems that a lot of VCRs and DVDs are impossible to figure out.

For something a little more affordable, DVD/VCR Combo players will allow you to watch all of your tapes and DVDs, but don’t have all of the transfer abilities. You can probably still record TV shows onto VHS tapes, but not back and forth between the different types of media. This is still great for your movie collection if you own a lot of tapes.

Even though I usually try to keep up with the new features in technology, we may not be quite ready to give up on the VCR yet. There are way too many Disney Classics and home movies that I probably won’t ever be able to let go of!

There are a lot of other VCR/DVD combos out there. Check out Panasonic for more options.

-Katie