JVC HM-DH30000U Recordability
Dear Gary: As much as I thoroughly enjoyed your excellent article on the JVC HM-DH30000U HD tape recorder, it only serves to confirm the cruel hoax that the entertainment industry is perpetrating on consumers. Even though the unit promises the potential to record digital (and HD) television, it does not come with an off-air tuner or inputs that are compatible with any tuners that I have found on the market. For me, I would have to replace expensive 4DTV C-Band and DirecTV decoders to receive anything to record. Aside from the hardware incompatibilities, there are no guarantees that the copyright holders will allow me to record anything with their new and improved Digital Rights Management (DRM) scheme. Finally, after spending a considerable sum of money on purchasing a front projector capable of displaying 1080p and waiting years for them to “show me the picture,” the best they can do is 1080i? (I know—a “future” version will have it.) I am disgusted. For years, I have had to buy very specialized, professional equipment in search of the audio/visual Holy Grail with the promise that content would be provided at some point. With DRM, content providers might not release anything for recording even with enough print to make a lawyer go blind. The bottom line is this: if equipment manufacturers decide not to provide analog HD outputs on their future products, I will boycott their new products and whine unceasingly to my Congressman. I thought I would never miss analog television—I was wrong. Once again, Widescreen Review has proved to be REQUIRED READING. Good job!
Harold M. Key, Mountlake Terrace, Washington
Editor-In-Chief Gary Reber Comments:
New product introductions are never perfect, but with time, those formats that survive manage to conform to the feature and performance demands of the market. The next wave of support for the JVC D-VHS D-Theater HM-DH30000U will be set-top ATSC turners with both IEEE 1394 (FireWire®) and DVI (Digital Visual Interface) connectivity. Eventually, there will probably be an integrated D-VHS/ATSC Set-Top unit. I don’t see CE manufacturers eliminating full-bandwidth analog video outputs in the near future—unless they want to bring down upon them the wrath of millions of consumers who invested in HDTV displays without standardized digital interface connectivity. But I do see the trend toward “protected” digital video outputs, which eventually will replace analog outputs when “standardized” digital input interfaces appear universally on displays and set-top boxes, and D-VHS and HD DVD source machines.
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