Toshiba DR160 DVD Recorder
Toshiba DR160 DVD Recorder
Customer Review: Adequate basic recorder
I was looking for a second entry-level -R/RW recorder, having already got a Funai 2737 (which does the job fine). Decided to try the Toshiba as it had the benefit of Chase Play. In actual fact, this Toshiba seems to be the same underlying chassis as the Funai, with a different (somewhat more attractive) fascia. All rear ports and the user interface are all identical. The only difference is the addition of chase play. If you are drawn to this machine because of this feature then beware. Chase play can only be used when recording in quality setting of long play, or lower. This is tolerable on a small screen TV, but the quality when viewed on a large screen is barely acceptable, more or less making chase play a feature you will never use anyway.
Apart from that, the unit looks and works fine, however, it might be worth considering the Funai and saving yourself ?25.
Customer Review: Not a bad machine, just too noisy
This machine has some very good points, but its too noisy to be used in a living room. Ours was RMAed.
On the plus side:
- Discs are initalised quickly, you can be recording on DVD-R within 20 secs.
- The menu system is clear and easy to use
- The DVD playing machanism is very quiet, you can’t hear the disc spinning at all
- The DVD-R disc recorded played perfectly in Pioneer DVD (Dv464), Argos in Car DVD and PC.
- It can play CDs of Jpegs.
However the downsides out weight these good features:
- Its very noisy, there is case fan at the back, that is always on when the recorder is. Watching Planet Earth with the DVD recording is, unconfortable, there is a constant whiring. Its 3 or 4 times noisyer than my AV reciever and I thought that was noisy!
- remote control is “boxy” and square, hence unconfortable in the hand.
- DVD-R take a LONG time to finalise, over 20 Mins.
- It cannot play DVD-R discs of photo JPEGs burnt on my PC, that my Pioneer DVD player plays fine.
Hence only 3 stars I’m afraid ….
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Used Price: ?207.99
Customer Review: Lasted just beyond the warranty
Worked great for 13 months but now freezes regularly and is very unreliable. Have lost a lot of recordings. Formatted the HD but no change. Very disappointed.
Customer Review: 18 months and kapput!
Absolutely fine for the first 18 months and then it wouldn’t finish a recording because it couldn’t write the finish to the hard disk. We’d come down in the morning and find that the red timer light was on and it was making a noise. Discovered it was trying to write to the disk to finish the recording, and must have been doing that for most of the night. Completely frozen. Only thing we could do was switch off at the mains and lose what we thought we’d recorded. Didn’t matter whether we tried recording from EPG or enterng the actual times. Only suggestion from Sony was to reformat the hard disk. Tried that, but it made no difference. They said if that didn’t work we would need to take it to a service engineer. Cost of that ?35 just to report what was wrong, then parts and labour for the actual repair after that. Decided it wasn’t worth it. We now have a very expensive Freeview box and DVD player, and a new Panasonic DVD recorder with HD and Freeview for just over half the cost of the Sony. Hope that’s better. Just in case we’ve taken out 3 year’s warranty, which we wouldn’t normally do, but after the experience with the Sony ….. Used to think Sony was the best, but not now.
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Samsung DVD and 250GB HDD Recorder
Used Price: ?200.00
Customer Review: Defective by design
This Samsung product has many great features. HDMI, HD compliant, 250GB and so on. Yet it will have you cursing at the device within hours of starting to use it. When programs are to be recorded using the timer capability, the device must be turned off. If you are playing something at the time, it will not record. So you must switch it off, let it start recording, then go back to what you were watching before, which naturally it has forgotten about leading to irritating searches. Then when the timed recording finishes, it switches off the device, regardless of what you were doing. It is intensely annoying to use. Not a good feature in a TV recorder. Other systems do not have this design flaw. One can only speculate as to why Samsung designers might consider this a sensible feature as it so obviously is not.
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