Having had three combos in the last 5 years I decided to try a number of them at the same time and then return the worst of them - because as many would agree, what I actually want is just not available.

In comparison to Toshiba 650, LG 797, Sony 555 (these are the ones I have tried so far), this one is the cheapest, by a significant amount of money and better than all of the others in one way or another. The LG797 is best but it is so sensitive to copyright there are TV shows (Mad Men on AMC), even cartoons (Stuart Little), Sometimes even Lifetime Movies that it will not record from a DVR or straight from Satellite. Samsung is not sensitive.

Samsung has three drawbacks that are almost dealbreakers - except that the other combos are so much worse in so many areas- not enough connections and it is slower than the others in editing features. It records RAM but not Double Layer discs. I have never had a combo that records RAM or DL until now so I would like it to... Read more

UPDATE 8/2008: After 18 months, it stopped working, giving a series of software errors, a message says "turn off/on" but the errors return. So today i would rate it much lower. The very first one i got was dead-in-box and an instant return, and this second one went kaput after 18 months of ordinary use. Amazon lets me edit this text but Amazon does not change my five star rating.
#######################
We delayed several years buying a DVD-R because so many models had mixed good/bad reviews. Finally when our DVD player died we moved up to this DVD/VHS double recorder. It doesn't have a 'tuner' - it expects some form of cable/dish tv input - but we haven't used an antenna in 10-15 years, so that didn't matter to us at all.

1) Ease of use. There are multiple types of DVD (DVD+R, -R, -RW, +RW etc). There are extra steps with most, to "initialize" the disk and to "finalize" the disk. But the VR357 will do most of these steps automatically if you want to. It... Read more

Firstly the "Consumer Alert" about pending obsolescence is utter and total nonsense, it was posted by an idiot. This device does not have a tuner, it does have both analog and digital inputs and outputs so it is compatible with the old TV standard ( current NTSC standard circa 1939 ) and the new digital standard starting in February 2009 ( ATSC digital TV ). I needed to replace a failed 10 year old VCR. We own a large collection of Tape and DVD media. This single box solution replaced not one, but two boxes on our media shelf, and outperformed both. We are very happy, as it is not very expensive. The only warning I have is that this runs a bit hotter than the DVD and VCR it replaced make certain you don't block the air vent, I add two small sticks under the unit to aid ventilation. It is very easy to dub old VHS tapes the DVD with the push of a single button. We like the thing.