LG RC199H - DVD recorder/ VCR combo
By: LG Average Rating: 1.5 Total Reviews: 27
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 On: 2008-05-03
Same problem as everybody else - it stops recognizing any DVD. Mine manifested the problem one week after the warranty expired.
On: 2008-04-07
Ive had this for a year and it has progressively had problems reading disks of all types - blank, commercial movies, disks burned by others, disks it burned only a few months before.
I hope someone organizes a class action lawsuit. I will never purchase another LG product again. Theyve been advertising that they make quality products but nothing could be further from the truth.
On: 2008-02-05
There is a serious design problem with these units. I had mine for about a year and only used it a couple of times, as it was in a vacation home. It will not read any DVDs. All I get is a spinning disc icon on the TV. This is a piece of junk! Do not waste your money. Oh, I forgot to mention that there are no LG authorized service dealers in the area and their central repair service center will not work on them if you do not have your original receipt. Again, I say -- this is a piece of junk and do not buy it!!
On: 2008-01-27
Ive had this recorder for a year and it has had problems after the first 3 months. At first it worked as it was supposed to. But after 3 months it started malfunctioning on playing commercial DVDs, wouldnt recognize disks it had made and that played fine before. Now it wont even finalize disks it just wrote. This device is way too expensive to have these malfunctions. I have been very careful in the way I handled this player. I have another player that I use for most viewing and I only used this one to record infrequently, yet it malfunctioned with little use.
Not recommended.
On: 2007-11-14
You would be well-advised to avoid this product. My son-in-law and I both bought one of these at the same time and have had the same (poor) experience. The playback quality of DVDs and VCRs are both excellent - when they work. However, this thing will not read half of the discs I put in it, including discs it has made itself. When you call their customer service, they recommend that you buy a DVD cleaner. Please! Even in the best of times, it takes an inordinate time just to spin-up a disc and read it. Many times after reading it for several minutes, it will reject the disc. Sometimes if you just close the door, it will read it. This product is not ready for prime time.
On: 2007-10-21
We got about 9 months out of this unit before it started having playback problems. It rapidly got worse after that, and it finally refused to accept any DVDs or CDs, regardless of whether those were recordable or not. So the whole unit suddenly became completely useless.
Since not having extended warranty I figured it was too expensive to try to get it fixed.
What I did is the following. When you open up the unit, the disc drive is in fact a standard PC IDE interfaced CD/DVD drive. So I took the old one out, and replaced it with another PC IDE CD/DVDRW drive that I had available. This is a fairly straightforward thing to do, as I believe most IDE interface units are a good enough fit.
So now the DVD player works, and Im even able to record to recordable DVDs in a similar manner as before. The only problem left is that for some reason Im not able to play some commercial DVDs now. I havent quite figured out what could be causing this, and it happens only with some latest DVD discs. Now I dont remember, and it is impossible to verify, if I already had the same problem before the DVD player went bad, i.e. if it came after the disc drive swap.
On: 2007-09-17
DVD reader died in 6 mos. $70 labor + shipping to "fix" it.
I guess LG isnt too concerned about their brand.
On: 2007-08-20
I bought one of these and was very pleased with it for about a year. Then, all of a sudden, inside a week, it stopped recognizing commercial dvds. Now it wont recognize anything. LG does not have a fix. From massive internet complaints, this is a common problem I have two LG internal DVD writers on my computers and have no problem with them. I cannnot figure out where the problem is. LG DOES NOT have firmware upgrades or anything useful on the web site. I have reached a dead end. Im probably going to junk it. Dont waste your money.
On: 2007-06-30
This unit drives me crazy. rarely use the unit and waited too long to return/exchange at Best Buy. The audio drops out every few seconds. Both the digital and analog feeds are affected. On last day of warranty, LG agreed to repair or replace. Got a reconditioned replacement and it too has the same problems. I wish I would have read reviews before purchasing. This was a lot of money to pay for lousy audio. Otherwise, picture an ease of use is nice.
 On: 2007-06-24
Unfortunately, add my family to the list of people burned by this poor quality product. It did work well in the beginning so I gave it two stars instead of one. It fails to recognize most commercial disks at this point. I did not heavily use the unit, so it took longer to realize there were problems. From the other posts on this site, it looks like I am out of luck . The trouble is, I would have given this four or five stars during the first few months. Beware. I sincerely hope this device is not for sale any longer.
On: 2007-06-23
I really liked this unit a lot when I first purchased it. I had some issues with the HDMI output and my Plasma screen being green but a power cycle always solved it. 6 months into owning it is when the real trouble started. In the middle of a movie suddenly the unit would freeze. No amount of voodoo would get it out of its slumber. Unplugging was the only option. At this stage, it will only reliably play 1 out of 3 DVDs and wont even recognize some that it used to. This thing is being tossed in the can once I find a Non-LG replacement.
On: 2007-05-26
Too bad Amazon makes me rate at least a one because this player is a zero. We purchased it in July 06 but used it very little. I would guess weve used it less than 10 times. After about the 3rd use, it quit reading commercial discs. I tried disabling the auto-play feature to see if that would help and it did not. I can eject and reload the disc 20 times and it might evenutally play. These are the same problems that everyone else is complaining about. I only wish I was within my American Express warranty period or had purchased the extended warranty. I have no other problems with it...records OK, plays mini dvds from my camcorder, VCR works, reads camera card but dont try to play a danged movie!
On: 2007-04-29
My wife and I bought this product in December as a Christmas present (Dec 16th 06). We didnt even use this until the middle of January when we hung our new plasma tv and remodeled our living room. Well, immediately we noticed that the machine would not recognize the dvds all the time. We would try them a couple times and they would work most of the time. Well, it kept getting worse. I called the 800 number on the manual and the "lady" told me to unplug the machine for a minute and plug it back in. Well, this worked a couple times (it wouldnt even shut-off some of the times). I called LG last week and they told me that my warranty was now up, but the parts are still covered. They recommended I take it to Best Buy and have them fix it. I called best buy and they said to bring it buy and theyll see what they can do. They said they could fix it and it would cost approximately $41.00. I put a non-refundable deposit down of $24.00 for them to send it out to get repaired. I received a call a couple days later saying it is going to cost $80.00 PLUS to fix it. Their only reply was "do you accept or deny these charges". What a GREAT customer service "Best Buy" has. Not only did they double their estimate to fix my machine, they suckered me into basically GIVING them $24. I have bought a lot of merchandise from Best Buy in the past, and this is the first time I dealt with their service department......NEVER AGAIN AM I GOING TO PURCHASE AN LG PRODUCT OR ANTHING FROM BEST BUY !!!! I hope a lot of you will do the same so we can send a message to these businesses that if you screw the customers, youre not going to be in business long. This product (& company) does not deserve any stars, but apparently "1" is the minimum you can rate....sorry.
 On: 2007-04-16
Im a bit surprised at some of the venom directed towards this machine. I suspect it is due to not being experienced with the far worse models on the market like I am. I, too, might have hated this machine had I not tried about 4 other kinds first. I have purchased 3 of them. The first two were defective and had to be returned to Best Buy (no problems at all or any kind of hassle in that department, unlike other reviewers). When I finally got one that worked I was satisfied with it. The menus are easy to navigate (unlike the Philips), editing is easy (you can pause during recording and eliminate commercials unlike the Panasonic), the remote control is easy to use (unlike the Philips) etc. This is the best all-around DVD recorder on the market...except that it is no longer on the market. This particular model was discontinued this past month and the new one has already hit the shelves. For some reason Amazon does not seem to carry it so go to Best Buy or something. I have the new model as well and everything Ive said in this review is applicable to it as well. Trust me, in the world of DVD recorders you can do much worse.
On: 2007-04-10
For fear of sounding like a broken record, I too have had problems with this device. It will not play most DVDs, and those that it will play freeze up on playback. The device gets confused as to whether it is on or off, and will not eject disks unless you first unplug and plug back in. Customer service is next to useless and the only thing worse than the warranty is Best Buys return policy (or lack thereof). Do not purchase this product; do not purchase from Best Buy; do not pass go; do not collect $100.
On: 2007-03-22
Id been looking at DVD recorders for about 3 years before I finally bought this one last summer at Best Buy. It looked good, it was supposed to use every kind of disks available, and you could play a recording from the beginning while still recording it, which was my favorite feature. It was bad from the beginning and just got worse. It would take on average about 2 minutes to boot up and recognize the disk that was in it if it did. It wouldnt play some commercial disks or Scene It? game disks and recordings would skip, the antenna (RF) input stopped working and the fan was loud.
I am so disappointed, this should have been an awesome product. Even the VCR had problems. Upconversion on my 42" LCD wasnt even noticeable. Thank god I bought the warranty. Took it back after 6 months, Best Buy had it for a month and couldnt fix it and let me exchange it for a Samsung VR330.
The Samsung is going back this weekend. (That will be another review). Im getting really tired of researching and reading reviews on recorders. Does anybody make a quality product anymore?
On: 2007-03-15
I purchased this model in July 2006. Playback of Hi-Fi video cassettes produced garbled sound and only the left channel was working, so I returned it for a replacement unit.
That unit seemed to work well. After studying the manual, I was able to record my home movies to disc, although editing them was not very easy. I can view pictures from the card reader, but it wont even display the video content, so I cant record it unless I go through the camera itself. When trying to record content from shows saved on my DVR, I was disappointed that MOST of them could not be recorded (copyright protection). I have also had problems with the clock resetting to the wrong time, as other here have.
A power surge caused the unit to stop functioning (even though it was plugged into a hi-grade surge protector). I took it to Best Buy for servicing, as I had purchased the extra service protection plan. When the unit was returned to me, I purchased the movie "Click" on DVD. When I tried to play the movie, it began on Chapter 2 (7 minutes in). If I tried to skip back or go to menu, it locked up and had to be unplugged to reset or eject the disc. I tried several other DVDs to see if the problem was the disc. Some of them worked fine, a few others gave me strange problems, like horizontal lines on the screen, not starting at the beginning, or not starting at all.
When I inspected the faulty discs, I noticed that they are all movies made by Sony pictures. I took the unit back to Best Buy to see if they could fix the problem. They sent it away and it came back with the same results, so they replaced the unit with the same model. I am now on my THIRD unit, and STILL have this problem, but Im reluctant to send it away again or hassle with another defective unit. I dont think that Best Buy can fix the problem, and LG wants to charge me $69 minimum.
I have also contacted Sony Entertainment regarding this issue, and was assured there was no reason their discs would not work with this player. I have about 20 of their DVDs that I cannot watch on this player. VERY FRUSTRATING!!
UPDATE: After 10 phone calls, I FINALLY found a tech who could fix the disc play problem! It seems SONY discs have built-in auto-play that conflicts with the auto-play feature on the player. Once that feature is disabled on the player, my Sony discs play without problem. Yea! I will still only give it 3 stars, though. The customer support at LG is VERY lacking!
On: 2007-02-15
I am sad to say my wife and I fell victim to the sales pitch at Best Buy and purchased this LG unit. For the first five to six months it worked well. The upconverting to near HD quality on standard DVDs is great.
However, after the unit was six months old it began to have problems reading DVDs....any DVDs: Brand new, movies, blanks, previously recorded discs, etc. Well, we called the Best Buy we purchased the unit from. Of course they were no help AT ALL. They said, "Sorry, its been over 3 months since you guys bought it, we cant help you."
My next step was to call LG directly. The LG "customer no-service" tech said since the unit is more than six months from the purchase date they will only warranty parts, no labor. So now my situation is essentially that I paid appx $300 for a fancy VCR player!!
The worst part is that LG is making me mail it back to them (yes, I have to pick up the mailing charges), AND PAY A $69 "LABOR" FEE, just to see if they can even fix this unit.
Six months and its dead.
When the "customer no-service" tech asked if he could help me in any other way than what I have described above, I simply said, "Well why dont you invent a time machine so that I can go back and prevent myself from dropping $300 on this load of @#!t."
So Im taking my cause to the web, to prevent any more poor souls from buying this fancy looking terd.
On: 2007-02-14
I am sad to say my wife and I fell victim to the sales pitch at Best Buy and purchased this LG unit. For the first five to six months it worked well. The upconverting to near HD quality on standard DVDs is great.
However, after the unit was six months old it began to have problems reading DVDs....any DVDs: Brand new, movies, blanks, previously recorded discs, etc. Well, we called the Best Buy we purchased the unit from. Of course they were no help AT ALL. They said, "Sorry, its been over 3 months since you guys bought it, we cant help you."
My next step was to call LG directly. The LG "customer no-service" tech said since the unit is more than six months from the purchase date they will only warranty parts, no labor. So now my situation is essentially that I paid appx $300 for a fancy VCR player!!
The worst part is that LG is making me mail it back to them (yes, I have to pick up the mailing charges), AND PAY A $69 "LABOR" FEE, just to see if they can even fix this unit.
Six months and its dead.
When the "customer no-service" tech asked if he could help me in any other way than what I have described above, I simply said, "Well why dont you invent a time machine so that I can go back and prevent myself from dropping $300 on this load of @#!t."
So Im taking my cause to the web, to prevent any more poor souls from buying this fancy looking terd.
 On: 2007-01-25
I bought this combo unit for one reason.....to copy my old VHS tapes to DVD. Later after I learned how to operate the unit, I hooked it up with my home theater system and that is what I use with my hard drive unit from Direct tv.
I dont know what disc others are having problems with, but i use whatever I can find on sale at office max, Staples, Circuit city etc such as Burn Master DVD-R works great and even House brand from office max have not caused me any problems.
I use the CF card reader to record to DVD from my Canon digital camera and it works fine. I do think more function could have been put on the front of the recorder that were included on the remote.
Premium channels require a few tweeks to record them. Since they are copyrighted by those channels (HBO etc) you have to record to the hard drive (on a seperate unit) and then transfer to your DVD. (I have the Direct TV sony HDD as my primary receiver to record to and then just send it to the LG DVD or VHS.
I use this feature only a few times since it takes some setting up, But as I said my main purpose was to record VHS to DVD and get a better quality DVD than I had originally on the old VHS tape, which the uplink handles nicely if you set it to the 1080p and do not use the default setting that is set when you take it out of the box.
As with any machine you cannot depend on the tech support guys to tell you what you are doing wrong........go online and post your problems and get the replies from those "geeks that do ths everyday.
I am into my 3 cakebox of 50 DVD-Rs , so I have 150 VHS tapes now converted to DVD.
I would like to see some technology that would be like recording cassettes used to be such as 2x or 3x dubbing to DVD to reduce the time consuming VHS to DVD. Waiting on a 3 hour tape to record to a DVD takes.........well 3 hours. Bottom line.....I would not give up this machine until they come out with an upgraded better model or it breaks.
On: 2007-01-06
This machine suffers from the same problem that plagues all DVD recorders, it is made to look good but at the cost of inconvenience. I have not had any of the problems other users describe. It records as indicated in the manual and I have not found any DVDs it did not play, including home made ones on my computer. What irks me about this machine is that the designers did not put any useful buttons on the machines and those that they did put are hidden behind a door. If you loose the remote, or your 3 year old puts it in sink, the machine is 99% dead. Even if the kids miss the remotes, remotes always break after 2-3 years anyway. Without a remote all you can do is press play. No fast forward, no backward, no features, nothing else. A VHS tape you can play but not rewind. Adding drawer with all the remote functions would easily fix that. Of course it would add $20-30 to the cost, but it is better to pay $20 with the machine and enjoy the convenience when the remote is misplaced, than paying $80 for a new remote when its lost. In addition to the inconvenience of not having buttons on the recorder, I find also the menus to be unnecessarily complicated. To summarize, check the competition - sooner or later you should find a better designed recorder.
On: 2006-12-31
I have had some success in recording things on Sony DVD-R disc, so no problem there. My main complaint with this device is with playing previously recorded titles. It simply wont load the disc up. All we get is an endless disc spinning in the upper left corner of the screen. To get it out of the machine, it has become necessary to unplug the machine, plug it back in, and then start hitting the eject button on the remote. It plays the discs that it has recorded, just not store bought movies. LG should stop advertising Life is Good. LG should stand for Lousy Garbage. Stay away from LG for the rest of your life. Dont make the same mistake we did.
On: 2006-12-30
I have had some success in recording things on Sony DVD-R disc, so no problem there. My main complaint with this device is with playing previously recorded titles. It simply wont load the disc up. All we get is an endless disc spinning in the upper left corner of the screen. To get it out of the machine, it has become necessary to unplug the machine, plug it back in, and then start hitting the eject button on the remote. It plays the discs that it has recorded, just not store bought movies. LG should stop advertising Life is Good. LG should stand for Lousy Garbage. Stay away from LG for the rest of your life. Dont make the same mistake we did.
On: 2006-12-14
Referring to a prior review, I dislike and strongly advise against purchasing this unit for the very same reasons.
There is something seriously wrong with this machine in that it will not read any standard recordable disk sold in the United States. Instead, the instructions include a list of "recommended" recording media consisting of a group of disks which are either obscure or completely unavailable here in this country. Mind you, this list which is located in the owners manual is only the "recommended media", and there is never any advice or warning that you should not or cannot use disks made by other companies, certainly nothing to warn you of this problem in advance of your purchase (it is not on the box or in the ad literature). Some of these "recommended" disks are: Mitsubishi (cannot purchase here); Thats (did anyone ever even hear of this brand?); Verbatim (try to find it); Ricoh (are they kidding); JVC (just not on any store shelf); Victor (huh?); Maxell (once a leading casette and floppy disk manufacturer, but just try to find a DVD recordable disk for sale in this country); Imation and Fujifilm (maybe available in Bangkok). But thats not all. Finally you locate a Sony disk type that is included in the "recommended" list (theres only one!), and you load it in, and guess what. It doesnt work. The machine advises that it is an "unrecognized media", or that there is no disk, or it simply spits it out in the disk draw with no message at all. Oddly, in a box of 25 of these disks, 3 or 4 of them will actually work, and the others will not! I am an attorney, and if I cannot enforce the extended warranty of American Express for this unit, I intend to institute suit against Best Buy and LG Electronics for selling a defective and inoperable product which is unfit for its intended use. Please save your money and buy something else. ...
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On: 2006-12-08
I bought one of these units and it is horrible. It will not read/use/format blank DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD+RW, DVD-RW so it is only good as a DVD player. When you call tech support they will tell you to buy Mitshibusi DVD (only availabe in Australia). Other formats they claim will have 95% failure rates when trying to record. I tried Verbatium, Memorex, Toshiba and they all failed with 90% error rates or more
Save your money, buy anything other than LG, I know Ill never buy an LG product as I feel cheated by the product and slighted by customer service.
On: 2006-11-16
Looks like Im the only one whos had a good experience with this machine. For my purposes, it has performed well. I was looking for a "band-aid" product while I wait for a dish network DVR. I own a horrible early generation Philips DVD recorder and have been resistant to try another one. The recording on both VHS and DVD(DVD+RWs) have worked perfectly including timer recordings. I have an older generation Mitsubishi widescreen HDTV (with no HDMI input) that connected perfectly with component jacks.
My only minor compaints:
-I also cant get the auto-clock feature to work
-Cant get all the basic Mitsubishi TV functions to work on the LG remote which could have helped me get an extra remote off my coffee table.
On: 2006-11-13
I purchased an LG RC199H to go with a new Samsung 2641 LCD TV. I could get the LG to communicate with the TV via component video cables or via coaxial cable, but not via HDMI. I spent many, many hours over 5 days, trying everything I could think of the get the HDMI connection to work. I called Samsung many times, had the HDMI cable and the LG tested at the store where I purchased them, even exchanged the TV, thinking it was the problem. I called Samsung technical service many times and, when I finally called LG, I found that Samsung TVs and HG recorders often cannot communicate via HDMI. The Samsung and LG technicians tried very hard to help me get my system set up for HDMI but nothing worked. I finally took the LG back where I purchased it and got a refund.
On: 2006-11-03
Ive never had this happen so quickly with a consumer electronic product but this dvd vhs combo unit stopped working altogether only 105 days into my ownership. The dvd portion is not able to read my Netflix disks and, adding insult to injury, it now wont eject it. Ouch! Time to get the sledge hammer. Seriously, I would consider another product based on my experience.
On: 2006-09-04
I dont trust this product what so ever. The auto clock didnt work right away. I used manual and now my clock keeps changing an hour off repeatedly. If for some reason the power flickers, all timers are gone. Two of my local channels keep switching between stereo and mono, therefore completely messing up my recording. The component video outs are screwed up and the fan is making a wierd noise. The pluses on this unit are that it can play and divx formats and it has an HDMI output. If you like playing a lot of movies this unit is ok. If you record movies or tv shows, If I were you, Id get the Philips DVDR-3320v. I have them both. The philips is a better unit. The LG just have more features. If you have specific questions, EMAIL ME. imperialdefence@yahoo.com
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