At lunch yesterday I went up to Best Buy to get a new VCR, since the one in our living room is on it's last leg.

Our home set up is such that we have Cable TV, but we don't have/need a box. The coaxial cable comes right from the wall and plugs into the VCR, and coaxial cable goes from the VCR to the TV. Apparently this is a rare thing these days, because stores aren't carrying VCRs like this any more. I've found a number of them online, but it's tough to find one with all the features I want/need, for a reasonable price (under $100). It seems to make sense to go ahead and get a DVD Recorder/VCR combo, since you get so many more features, for not much more then I'd pay for the VCR alone. The problem is, I need it to have a 'tuner' of some kind. My tech knowledge in this regard is seriously lacking. I'm not too picky about the quality of what I listen to or watch, probably because I'm cheap, so I've spent very little time learn all of the ins and outs of it all.

So, we pick up one of these combo devices w/ a tuner today and it's an LG (which in my mind means it's likely to be pretty good).

To make a long story short, I ended up taking it back to get a refund.

Most of our channels that we tape wouldn't show up when we did the channel scan. The signal coming into the house is analog. The device had a ATSC tuner. We first chose to scan 'TV' which picked up about half of our channels, and only about half of the ones we care about. Then we tried scanning w/ 'CATV', and that never seemed to finish, it kept getting stuck, and then we'd stop it, and there weren't any channels available. We then decided to look up this model online, and it was trashed everywhere we looked. No one seemed to like it.

So now we're a bit leery to buy anything, but we're desperate to get something, since the remote for the old one has lost much of it's functionality.

Oh well. I'm a perpetual newbie when it comes to Audio/Video tech (my interest lie elsewhere), but to my family I'm a Tech God, so there's always that.