OTHER TECH

In addition to its high-definition recording capability, the JVC plays prerecorded high-def tapes encoded using the company's new D-Theater copy-protection scheme (Access Denied!). A handful of Hollywood studios, including DreamWorks, Fox, Universal, and Artisan, have announced plans to release high-definition movies on D-VHS with D-Theater encoding by the end of the year. While these announcements are good news for HDTV-hungry viewers, there's quite a bit of confusion surrounding D-Theater.

Currently, only the JVC deck incorporates D-Theater decoding, which means that the considerably less expensive Mitsubishi D-VHS VCR won't play the new tapes. Also, with high-def DVD players on the horizon, any tape format sure seems like a step backward technologically. Movie fans have become used to the fancy features DVD provides - like instant scene access, special playback effects, and extra content - and they're probably not going to be happy about going back to a medium that lacks them.

Those issues aside, this is a remarkable VCR. I didn't get to record any digital TV broadcasts for the reasons cited above, but the D-VHS transfers I made from MiniDV camcorder footage using a FireWire connection (following Sony's lead, JVC calls this i.Link) looked extraordinarily crisp and clean. The VCR's LS3 mode is said to let you record up to 24 hours of standard-definition (480i-format) programming on a single D-VHS cassette. The STD (standard) mode provides up to 8 hours of recording time on the same tape, JVC says, while the HS mode, which is meant for HDTV recording, gives you 4 hours.

I was surprised at how good the recordings I made of analog broadcasts in the LS3 mode looked. A few banding artifacts were visible in the backgrounds of a newscast, but the image was stable and sharp. Switching to the deck's STD mode - said to offer an MPEG-2 encoding rate of 14.1 megabits per second (Mbps), or twice the average rate of most DVD transfers - eliminated the bands completely. But considering that I was only recording network news and not a movie, the STD mode was higher quality than I needed.