The market is flooded with cheap cheap plasticized vcrs from China with names you can’t pronounce.
Buy a cheapy from Circuit City & buy the extended warrentee [yeah, so they say never to buy one, in this case you can] for three years cause those vcrs are disposable.
Features you get for more money that I really really like: 1. commerical advance [the one that does it automatically so you don’t have to hit buttons for 30 FF] 2. film advance [goes to the start of a video you rented for you & says: ready to play, push play].
Those two features only added $20 to a vcr I bought & I figure they give me back about 200 hours of time per year.