Toshiba D-R410

I have had the Toshiba DVR620 DVD/VHS for 3-4 months now. I am very pleased with this product. I have dubbed about 20 VHS to DVD and recorded programs from my cable box to VHS & DVD. I have been very… pleased with the ease of use and quality of the recordings. It is important to follow the directions in the manual carefully on page 50 & 51 for DVD/VCR Dubbing and page 32 on "Finalizing". The first couple I attemted to Dub, I had difficulty with until I closely followed the steps on those pages. Once I got the hang of it, it's a breeze. To make multiple copies of VHS home movies on DVD to share with family, it is much faster to dub the VHS to a finalized DVD, then copy the finalized DVD on the computer from my internal DVD drive to an external DVD drive. This method takes only a matter of minutes. Thus far, I could not be more satisfied with this product. I am glad I made the purchase and have successfully been able to convert my home movies to DVD for sharing as well being able to preserve some old favorite recorded VHS programs.

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We've had it for two year now, and have recorded at least two hundred hours. The playback is slow. Really slow. But the recording is easy and the quality options are diverse enough that you can do 8… hours of kids' animation and then tape a two hour high quality movie. It allows you to tape movies and shows; some recorders stop taping when they hit the protection signals, but this one keeps taping. The upconvert is nice...it makes homemade DVD's look better. It doesn't play photographs, which I was disappointed to find out. But otherwise, it's been working well for us. It didn't come with an HDMI cord...given how cheap they are, you'd think it would be included.

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I personally purchased this player so that I could transfer a handful of vhs videos that have no dvd release, as well as some home recordings. For my needs, and what I wanted it to do, this machine has… worked wonderfully. The initial hookup to get playback was simple enough, although I had to 'play' with my connections for a while in order to get the signal going in the right direction for dvd recording off the vcr (no fault of the machine, I just have to many devices wired and rigged through my television). Once I mastered the hookup and the settings (again, simple enough - if I can do it it's a good bet that a well behaved chimpanzee could do it), the transfer results were fantastic. My television, A DVD player (not blue-ray mind you), An original Xbox, and an older model vcr running through two rf-modulators. This system plays and records fine for me. Oh, and my cable line is direct, no set top box or anything like that. This unit was also purchased used from Amazon. For me it does the job and was a great buy.

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I'm using this unit with a DishTV satellite box and a Samsung A630 wide-screen HDTV. After all the positive reviews I read on Amazon, I thought it might be worthwhile to try this unit rather that buy a much… more expensive Blue-ray unit. However, after quite a few weekends of testing, I've determined that this unit is only good for upconverting some prerecorded movie DVDs, but not all. And it isn't very good at recording anything - the best recordings I can capture only display as grainy 33" pictures within my 46" screen, leaving lots of surrounding black space. As for upconverting prerecorded DVDs, it only seems to handle movies that were never originally distributed on VHS. So for most older movies (e.g., pre year 2000) that haven't been re-mastered for wide-screen or HD, the best display level I can get is 4:3 - all the other zoom levels result in a squished frame. So I watch those in my old DVD player, which outputs a clear 16:9 picture that is not squished. As for recording, I haven't been able to capture true HD input from the satellite box, nor have I been able to capture clear VHS recordings, nor have I been able to always record a DVD that plays in all other DVD players. I know about "finalizing", and I know the difference between -R and +R formats, and I've tried both S-video and RCA cable inputs to the unit. But no combination of physical inputs, DVD formats, or soft settings results in anything approaching a quality recording. I've also spent considerable time reviewing user forums, where I learned that the satellite box output may be the cause of some of the recording problems I've experienced, but there is no way to test that, and besides, there would be nothing that I could do about it. At least this whole experience will help me better evaluate a replacement unit.

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Wife made a very uninformed purchase and bought this model today at BestBuy. Ugh... First, she overpaid by $40 (BestBuy is a ripoff). Second, the idea was to replace an aged and defective VCR with a more… 'modern' technology. But there's no way to connect the RF coaxial cable from our television service, making this device virtually useless. Third, there's no optical digital out plug, meaning that when using this DVR for commercial DVD playback, there's no way to get the surround sound signal from the DVR to the home theater system. Fourth, there's a high-pitch whining emitting from the machine when a DVD is inserted. Very annoying.

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