I bought a Samsung DVD VR375 - DVD recorder/ VCR combo, which will record from dvd to videocassette or from or from videocassette to dvd--to be honest, I haven't done either, I've just recorded broadcasts, but the quality has been good, and the unit was $85 from TigerDirect(I didn't bother to link, because as of last week, they don't carry them anymore), but you can find them other places.

The standard line is that all-in-one units are lower quality than components, and yes, you could probably get better recording quality by wiring components together, but it is easy to pop a cassette and a blank dvd into a dvd/vcr unit and push the record button, and the easier it is, the more likely you are to do it.

Incidentally, a fair amount of broadcast programming is "protected" so you can't copy it with one of these units. You can, however, copy it by simply running a firewire/IEE1394 cable from the cable box to you computer, and recording using one of a number of video recorder programs.   This sounds easy, and, in principle, it is, but in practice, it's a PITA.