Customer Reviews

Go Video VR2940 DVD Recorder/VCR Combo

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(37)

 

 

I was so pleased with this recorder the first week I had it till it started to freeze when shutting it off. It was user friendly and quality of picture and sound was great. I could live with the freezing when shutting it off but it started freezing when converting a tape to a DVD and at the end making the DVD useless after spending the hours converting it. It just got worse and worse so I was wasting time and money on the blank DVDs. White glove customer service is a joke. I've been calling for weeks and they claim an overload of calls to call back and when I did finally get a real person they couldn't help. Unfortunately my last alternative was to send it back for a refund to Amazon. I'm now afraid to exchange or purchase another GoVideo product due to this bad experience with them.
However, I will say I never once had a problem with Amazon. They are great as far as prices and exchanges and customer service.

Received dvd recorder, however it did not work. Over a period of three weeks, I sent six e-mails to GOVIDEO customer service. Received one response that provided general answers to common problems. This did not help. Cannot contact a "live" person at customer service by telephone -- instead you recieve a recording of the same general answers to common problems.

Beware of Go Video at all costs. Here is their repair policy, which is not fully spelled out in the manual or on their website:

If it breaks after 90 days, you must pay $90 in labor up front AND pay to ship it to them in Arizona, for a $300 machine. When do you find this out? When you call them (after endless delays) to let them know the thing broke. Even if it broke during the 90 days "full warranty" you must still pay to ship it on your own to Arizona.

This is for a machine that has been buggy at best, prone to constantly locking up. They act like they are doing you a favor to charge you a fortune to fix the machine. Furthermore what they do is keep your old machine and send you a refurbished one in the mail after several weeks. I can't see trusting their repair folks considering their customer service staff is dim witted, impossible to get on the phone and unable to do anyting but repeat the "company policy." They are empowered to do nohting.

Based on my experience, I am not giving these fools another dime of my money. I have a huge stack of tapes to convert and had hopes that this machine would do it. Unfortunatley, I am now out $300 bucks and this company could care less.

I purchased a R6640 recorder & didn't have any problems so I also bought a VR2940 to transfer by VHS tapes to DVD. No problem with the recorder and transfered about 25 tapes to DVD. The disks played ok on both machines until about 2 months later I decided to watch one of the DVD's again. I placed it in the VR2940 & my DVD+R loaded and showed DVD+RW. The disk is a DVD+R, not an RW disk! When I clicked on menu it came up "empty disk". I put the disk in my R6640 & it played ok. I went through all of the DVD's I had made copies of & 21 of the disks all showed up as DVD+RW "empty disk" on the VR2940 but played on the R6640. The four remaining disks played on both machines. I sent emails to customer service & received an automated response showing common questions & that I would be contacted by customer "service". I was never contacted so I called customer "service" and they were no help. They had no idea what the problem was. I don't think they are tech savy and calling them about a tech problem is a waste of time. The only thing they said was they would send me an update disk for my model & that might solve the problem. I waited two months and called twice without ever receiving the update disk. I finally wrote a letter & addressed it to customer service supervisor/manager. I never heard from him/her but I did receive the disk finally. It didn't help! Go-Video needs to change the name of their dept from customer "service" to customer "non service". After checking the company on the better business bureau web site I found the name of the the customer service manager is Bill Galey. I sent him a letter on 12/16/05 & it is now 01/08/06. I have not had a response. You might save a few bucks buying Go-Video but it isn't worth the problems you will have with the product or the help you will "not" get from the company.

This unit came with so many problems that I had to return it to Go Video. My replacement was a refurbished unit (for which I paid full price). This new unit usually cannot play the discs that it recorded. The times that it does play lasts only 20 minutes or so before the screen goes blank. Customer service is as bad as the unit itself. I've been waiting a week now to get a response. Read the other reviews of this product and then buy something else. Go Video should not have put this product on the market.

This is the second DVD recorder that I have purchased and this one is giving me fits compared to the Go Video R6740. The main problem that I am encountering is that I set the timer, turn the machine off and leave. When I return, the timer did not function properly. It did not make a recording, however, it did go to the station on the tv to be recorded. Also, it does not turn on easily. I stand in front of the machine, and turn on the power and nothing happens. I try to turn it on from the remote -- nothing happens. The only thing which turns in on is to unplug the power and replug it back in. Of course, then I lose the time, the programs which were set to the timer (which doesn't work anyone). This is not a keeper!

I bought my unit from Amazon in January 2005 and it started working quite well. I did disable the auto clock setting to stop the freezing up that required unplugging (and the requisite clearing of all my programming). The unit became more and more sensitive - would record on some DVD's and not others. Would randomly lock up during playback.

The customer service people lied to me endlessly about certain brands of DVD media being bad. The customer service people who provide email support apparently don't speak much english because they can't understand anything you write to them and their responses are quite unintelligible.

After upgrading the systems internal firmware and many efforts at using this piece of junk, it finally wouldn't even play pre-recorded DVD's. It just clicked noisily every time I put in a DVD. It was about 10 months old and I finally got on the line with the customer service people and begged and pleaded for them to send me a new drive. They decided to eventually not charge me the in-warranty replacement cost of $90 and sent me a new unit. They sent a different model which I have had for a few days and it works fine so far. I can't recommend that anyone buy a GoVideo unit for any reason. Even if someone gives it to you as a gift, send it back to the company. I was ready to have a great experience as I have in the past with GoVideo dual deck VCRs but they have gone to the dogs for certain.

Selwyn
Austin, TX

If you're among those who are happy with this machine... good for you... you're VERY lucky!
Like most of the reports here, mine's junk too. I recorded a bunch of my old "classic" VCR's to DVD and was not smart enough to save the tapes. A lot of them were re-recorded and now lost.
The machine freezes with every Go recorded disk, and the Go disks will not play with ANY other machine, either. It will play only factory DVD's. I wish I'd never seen the stupid thing. BIG mistake and BIG waste of money.
I'm now looking for a new reliable machine (that is, when I can afford it).
You can try it if you wish, but I don't think you'll be happy! In my opinion, it's no more than an expensive DVD player, and totally worthless as a recorder.

Not only does this unit freeze up and ruin discs, it has now denied me access to even watch my own TV my only recourse was to sign onto Amazon to see if that's where I ordered it, and check to see if it was still on warranty. What was I thinking?? Doesn't it bother all of you that most electronics are only warrantied for 90 days. If you bought a $50.00 DVD or VCR player, you could probably get year or two of good service, then chuck it. But I had to be the 1st one on the block to have this, and now 9 months later, the reviews speak for themslves. I will spread the word & never buy their products again

I would have to write a book explaining the problems I experienced with this unit right out of the box so will only mention a few. Both recordings I made using the YESDVD option were hard to get at and could only be accessed in a round about way through the set-up menu. I couldn't bring up the Title & Disc Menu's on the screen only getting the Play icon to show for a few seconds, or sometimes the Stop icon would appear.
I had this same problem on discs recorded "normally" i.e. without YESDVD, but could generally access the Menus so I could rename the recording {Title} or finalize the disc.
Note, I said generally and this was usually after ejecting the disc and reinserting it back in the 2940. With one disc I was unable to access these Menus even after I tried ejecting it, then shutting off the power & firing the unit back up or unplugging it and resetting the factory defaults.
The next day, when I gave it another try, it worked fine on my first attempt.

On playback of discs recorded on the 2940 I found areas where upwards of 10-15 seconds of the recorded material were missing as well as "glitchy" spots. When I tried to "rewind" to get a better look at the "glitch" the unit paused where I observed the problem and wouldn't let me proceed any further. I found three such areas in about 15 minutes of recorded material on one disc.
Of the 6 discs I checked for recording issues they all had some problem, either program loss or those "glitchy" spots. Based on this I didn't even bother checking the other 7 or 8 discs I recorded on knowing that I was sending the unit back.

Any disc that is being recorded on for the first time has to be initialized {formatted} and this is accomplished when the recording process is started as opposed to being done prior, which seriously messes with any Cue that you may have set-up when recording on a "first time" disc. On one tape that I tried to transfer that had footage right from the start {no lead-in} I lost 38 seconds of material while the disc initailized itself. In order to get the entire program when recording from Tivo I had to hit record on the 2940 and watch the Initialization Bar displayed on the screen {progess} and when I thought it was almost finished start the program I wanted to record.
Like I said, it messes with any Cue you may have but I'm not sure if this is the way the 2940 is designed or is because of a problem with the particular unit I had. The only mention of disc initialization in the owners manual stated this was how it was done so I'm figuring the unit was designed this way.
When I hit record on a tape to disc transfer the icon in the display window on the unit itself appeared as if the tape was being held up until initialization finished in order to save my cue but that didn't prove to be the case when the recording was checked. That was the recording I lost the 38 seconds on.
The spools in the VHS icon in the display didn't start rotating until initialization finished, that's why I thought the recording process was being held up thus saving my cue.

GoVideo didn't answered the two emails I sent them so the unit was returned to the retailer a week after receiving it. Even though I have another GoVideo unit, DDV2110, {Dual deck VCR} that I've been happy with for years I don't think I'll be purchasing another product from GoVideo anytime soon based on their poor Customer Service. I will say this, the picture quality of the recordings made on the unit that I looked at were excellent, which was what I expected since they were recorded at the highest quality settings {HQ~1hr. & SP~2hr.}