VCRs that will last forever

[Jeffhs]

My first VCR, bought new in 1984, was a Panasonic-built GE. It worked very well the six years I had it, but the heads finally wore out. However, the rest of the deck was in very good shape. Should have had it repaired, as I paid some $400 for it.

BTW, I saw another listing for a Magnavox (Philips?) VCR on the same page as the GE we're discussing. I had a Maggie VCR almost exactly like that one in the early 1990s. Like my GE unit, the Magnavox lasted just about five years before the heads wore out. The rest of the deck was probably still in excellent condition. My Magnavox deck was one of those VCRs that was ready to play out of the box (almost), as all one had to do was connect the antenna/cable, connect it to the TV, plug it in, and the machine would do its own setup--channel mapping, clock set; then it would be ready to go.

By the 1990s almost all VCRs were plug-and-play, with no setup of any kind required (except, of course, for the hookup to the TV and the signal source, be it cable or OTA antenna). Today's VHS/DVD players are probably even simpler yet to connect, as they do not have RF tuners, only needing a connection to the TV's A/V jacks or an RF modulator, the latter for older sets without such jacks. However, the darn things (not unlike VCRs by the '90s, until they went out of production) are made with cheap plastic parts and will not last much longer than the warranty period. I recently read in a post on FixYa.com that stated even today's DVD players won't last very long; specifically, Memorex-branded players have a cheap capacitor that swells and splits open after about nine months, a year at the outside. The reason? The firms that make these DVD players make them to sell cheaply, so they cannot use quality parts in them. (I had a CyberHome DVD player that lasted three years, then stopped reading discs; I swear, it was built more solidly than the player I bought last year to replace it.) I'm concerned about this (the possibility of premature failure), as I bought a Memorex DVD player for about $40 from Big Lots last summer. It works well at the moment, but I'm not looking forward to having to replace the machine this year.

Who actually manufactures Memorex-branded DVD players? Memorex itself was originally an audio-tape manufacturing firm, eventually, as technology evolved, branching out to video tape and compact discs--not to mention blank DVDs.

I seriously doubt, however, that Memorex was ever directly involved in the manufacture of DVD players; as a matter of fact, I think their DVD players are rebadged machines (like everything else these days) made by Orion or some other offshore manufacturer.