Rating: 
Summary: Best value for the price!
Review: The JVC HR-XVC33U is amazing! I've played several DVDs, store-bought videos, audio CDs, and a CD-R that contained audio and JPEGs. Everything played beautifully. At first I had some problems playing DVDs but after cleaning the DVDs it worked fine (whew!). After reading about so many lemons out there involving combo DVD/VCRs, I consider myself lucky! [knock on wood]Some other nice features are DVD Zoom (very cool!), diff. FFWD/RWD speeds, bookmarking, index skipping, front A/V inputs, excellent remote that controls TV/VCR/DVD, and VCR timer recording (up to 1 month). I did some serious research and price comparisons on several combo DVD/VCR players before deciding on the JVC HR-XVC33U. In the end I picked the JVC model because it seemed to be plagued by *less* problems than the other models, had a huge feature set, and was cheap compared to other models in its class. The Sony SLV-D300P has almost identical features plus Flash Rewind and looks nicer but costs about $25 more. The Sony SLV-D500P has identical features and VCR+ and an illuminated remote but costs about $35 more. Other competitors in its class were: Toshiba SD-V391 (different model had very low rating on Consumer Reports - bad sign), Panasonic PV-D4743K/S (can't record DVDs, about $10 more than JVC, but plays DVD Audio which is rare), and Samsung DVD-V3650 (the consistently bad ratings on every Samsung model told me to run away fast). One thing you need to be careful of is that combo DVD/VCRs sometimes skimp on features you would expect in a standalone DVD or VCR player such as VCR+, front A/V inputs, VCR timer recording, and DVR-to-VCR recording. Also, I suspect that the many reviewers who reported DVD playback problems (I'm talking about for ALL combo DVD/VCR players not just JVC) didn't try cleaning the DVD first. I would definitely recommend getting the JVC!!
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