Is it necessary to have an RGB scart input?

[peacock lady]

I have been trying to research, for the last few months, which is the best dvd recorder with hdd. I thought I had found one. The JVC DR-MH50. It gives me everything I need, and has a large 250 gb hard drive.
When I went online to check out a review, it said it was a fantastic machine, except it was badly flawed because it didn,t have an RGB scart input.
It is really necessary to have one of these, and if so, why?
I hope someone can help, as I am tearing my hair out here!

[uxbridge]

Necessary.....it is not necessary, not at all.
It would have been better of course to have RGB input.

SCART plugs can receive input video/audio signal in 3 ways:

RGB, S-VIDEO, COMPOSITE.
Not many support them all.

RGB is supposed to give you the best quality, arguably S-VIDEO only slightly worse, and Composite worst of the three.
However this does not affect recording your TV programs cause this is done internally by the machine.

Only if you want to record video/audio from external sources, such as SAT, Digital terrestrial TV or even a VHS, that type of input is concerned.

In that case, if it is VHS, you will not miss RGB input at all.
If you want to record from a DTV source, then you might miss RGB, however if you use S-Video (I've seen the manual and this is supported) you will still get outstanding quality in your recording.

Probably the review you saw was made by somebody who was enthousiastic at the machine and was just wondering why such a "beauty" did not have the best possible input way, that is RGB.

I personally would not mind at all missing RGB input in a Digital VCR.
Hope this helps

Ciao

[peacock lady]

Thank you Uxbridge. This really does help me. I will be recording mostly from dtv, but if s-video is almost as good as rgb, then that mkes my decision much easier

[uxbridge]

Glad to help.

Not to confuse you, but if most of your recording is from DTV and you have a powerful PC, (2 Ghz) a DVB-T card will cost much less and provide slightly better quality recording than any VCR (RGB or whatever) cause you will record directly the mpeg2 stream.
Then you could make a DVD disk out of your recorded program with your existing DVD burner in the PC.

It is more complicated however.

Ciao

[peacock lady]

Now I am confused! I have just downloaded the specs for this machine again, and it says there are 2 x rgb scart connections? Could you confirm this for me please, as something must be wrong somewhere?

[uxbridge]

In the manual it says RGB is supported as OUTPUT signal, that is as a signal to your TV set.
This is correct and pretty normal with any stand-alone DVD player,
but it does not mean it accepts RGB as an INPUT.

Indeed the manual makes no mention of RGB INPUT, that means you cannot have it.

Ciao

[redmist]

I will be recording mostly from dtv, but if s-video is almost as good as rgb, then that mkes my decision much easier

Be careful here, not all DTV receivers (cable, satellite, freeview) support S-video output... if indeed any of them. So you may be stuck with composite. Besides, in my experience S-video is still a long way behind RGB in picture quality.

If it's any help I have a Philips DVD recorder which does support RGB input and to be honest I wouldn't settle for anything less for recording off digital TV. The sharpness of colour transitions in particular really is excellent. The model I have is the DVDR-3305 which doesn't have a HDD, but I know they do models with hard disks so may be worth checking out.