I've had, from '93 to today, 9 JVC VCRs. All but 3 were mid to high-end consumer S-VHS decks. All but 1 are still operational; the one that I tossed out was bought refurbed and never worked quite right to begin with.
Overall, they have been excellent. The elder statesman, circa 1993, HR-S6800U blew a power supply a few years back because of a storm. No other repairs of note against the whole fleet.
And they've seen tons of use. While they don't get much active usage now, that crop of decks, when I was distributing anime fansubs, cranked out over 20,000 VHS & SVHS tapes for anime fans around the world, including the countries of all of the SF members (unless we have anyone from Japan here).
I've sold off the HiFi units and have so far kept the S-VHS decks as I've not had the opportunity to pass them on to someone who needs one (the friends I've recommended JVC decks to still use theirs & haven't needed replacements).
From memory since I'm at the office right now, I've got 2 9600s, 1 9500, 1 5400, and the old 6800 mentioned earlier. The 9x00 units have a TBC to improve image quality and provide clear images when doing FF/RW scans. The 6800 was/is excellent because it had 2 sets of audio outputs so I could feed 2 decks using their own audio (no splitters) & both the S-video & composite video outs. Later on, once the # of decks grew, I purchased A/V distribution amps so 1 master deck could send a signal to all the slave decks with minimal signal degradation (no daisy chaining).
Radboy, if you're in the Chicagoland area, I'll sell you one of the decks for a good price. But I'm afraid it wouldn't be worth it to ship one out.
- Fushigi
