JVC S5912 shows superb S-VHS video.

Author's Rating:

Pros: S-VHS, auto tape cal, fast rewind

Cons: No audio VU meters, minimal VCR front LED display.

The Bottom Line: 
If you desire a reasonable to cheaply priced S-VHS VCR, this appears to be a good one.

Author's Review
My wonderful Panasonic S-VHS deck of 12 years had bit the dust (extreme video noise with cleaned heads, tape carrier logic problems), and after reading some reviews here I decided the JVC S5911 would be a decent, cost effective, replacement. But when I got to the store, they only had the newer S5912 on sale.

As reviewers of previous JVC model VCR's have commented, this is a very light plastic unit -- but what can you expect these days with VCR's on the way out? This unit's front panel has S-VHS, comp vid, and R/L audio inputs -- but there is no cover for these and they are simply recessed a bit. It also has aud/vid in/out at the rear along with the standard coax antenna in/out.

The great thing about this VCR is the auto cal, where it checks the tape quality for best record & playback. The last TV recordings I made on my previous VCR with a brand new tape (S-VHS EP mode) were really terrible with the TV screen covered in streaking and noise. I placed this same tape into the new machine, and it did a pretty good job of locking on in the "cal" mode (just wanted to catch those last few shows I had recorded). I left this same tape in the new JVC machine for re-recording later in the week, and the playback in EP S-VHS mode onto a Hitachi widescreen HDTV is great, in SP mode the picture quality is superb for a VCR. This is a 19 micron four head VCR. It also has a flying erase head and audio/video editing capabilities, but I haven't had a use for these as yet.

I don't like the setup menu and programming as much as I did with the Panasonic, and really miss the audio VU meters and clock/elapsed time display that were on the front of the Panasonic. The JVC only shows the channel and a couple of icons such as record and S-VHS mode. I surmise from reviews of other JVC models that JVC has made one correction, the elapsed time will now remain on the screen after pushing the remote button, and will not go away after a few seconds -- you don't have to keep pushing the button to get the display to reappear. I have noticed that it still has the slow stop after rewind and FF, to the extent of going past your planned stop point by a few minutes, but I can compensate for this and it does not really bother me -- the extra fast rewind is a nice feature that overcomes this small negative.

This VCR has a feature where it will supposedly set the clock automatically from your local PBS station, but after waiting five minutes I gave up and set it manually (as the manual points-out, this feature may not work in all areas). The menu/setup programming is a little clumsy, the buttons don't always act the way you intuitively think they would/should, a little more thought into the UI (user interface) would do JVC a world of good.

This JVC S5912 seems to be a good unit so far, with great video quality, and I suppose I will get used to the differences in menu programming as time goes on. And, the editing capablities may come in useful someday for combining all those VHS-C home videos onto a regular tape -- although it may be time for a cheap recordable DVD by then.