Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

As a satisfied owner of an LG HDTV, I bought this DVD/VCR combo recorder fully expecting to be likewise happy with the quality of the images produced by another LG product. Unfortunately, I had to box it up for return the same day I got it. The problem with the product is one that I hadn't anticipated, but which further very specifically-targeted reading online revealed as a known problem with LG's DVD recorders. That problem is what various message-boarders and bloggers call "image over-processing". Translate that as "too much anti-aliasing" (image-smoothing) or "too much blur". And it was not just on the recorded images. For the minute you switch from the LG TV's internal tuner to the LG recorder's internal tuner, there's an instant layer of "smoothing" that is pronounced enough to be distracting. ...I am talking, depending on your threshold of sensitivity to such things, a potential headache-inducing level of fuzziness. If you purchase this product hoping to use it to archive your family videos, no way it can do them justice. If you plan to use it as a down and dirty digital era VCR, grabbing episodes of shows you intend to record over once you watch them a single time, it is really not quite servicable for that. All this keeps pulling me back to one head-shaker of a question: What were the people at LG thinking? At nearly three hundred bucks, the quality of the LG RC897T is a major disappointment.