Customer Reviews

Toshiba RD-XS34 DVD Recorder with 160-GB Hard Drive

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(18)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

This recorder offers some of the best features for a DVD recorder. Of special interest is the ability to tailor the bit rate of the recording in very small increments from 2Mb/sec to 8Mb/sec. It has the ability to record LPCM audio. It also allows you to record in Dolby Digital in 2 different bit rates. Overall, this unit offer incredible flexibility for the user. This was a huge selling point for me. It has a very easy interface (which becomes intuitive after a couple of uses) to create menus for DVDs. It's well designed and attractive.

Now for the bad news. A total showstopper: The TV Guide menu system never worked. The manual tells you to go through the set up process, then turn the unit off for 24 hours, avoiding unplugging any connections to the unit. I live in Austin, TX, and get my signals over the air. Reception is excellent in my area. The unit displayed all the available channels. They all came in clearly. But after 24 hours, I turned on the unit to find no program data. I must have done something wrong, so I went through the entire process again, ensuring that I waited 24 hours (this time, just to be safe, I waited 30 hours). I turned on the unit, and again, no data. I tried one more time. No luck. I called Toshiba. They said, "well, if the data doesn't show up, we can't help you".

I would have kept the unit if I could have recorded off the air by setting up schedules manually. The unit REQUIRES the TV Guide program guide. It is the only way that the unit can record TV shows.

Second huge issue for me, regardless of the state of the unit (on/off), the fan in the back of the unit stays on ALL THE TIME. And it's not so quiet. Forget about putting this unit in a small room, because you'll hear it...ALL THE TIME.

Given these two issue, back in the box it went. And here's the really disappointing point...I did my research. This unit has the best features for the price. It has a hefty 160 GB hard drive. It was the perfect unit....almost.

I purchased the RD-XS32 for my parents last December and was impressed with its capabilities and functionality. So I thought I'd buy the updated version, the RD-XS34 for myself. Huge mistake as many reviewers have already stated.

If you are thinking of purchasing this product, do your homework beforehand:
1) Call your cable/satellite provider and ask if they have a deal with TV Guide to allow their signal to come through their system.

If they don't you'll be purchasing a $500 boat anchor because you cannot set up timer recordings without the TV Guide system. A huge oversight on the part of Toshiba. A huge oversight on the part of TV Guide for not informing Toshiba about this little detail. Toshiba will be getting a lot of these units returned because they didn't inform their customers about TV Guide's limited support.

2) Read other reviews about the reliability of the TV Guide system. This is not the only other unit that has TV Guide and many people have reported some really annoying bugs, such as losing entire program guides and channel preferences, plus recording memory.

3) If your cable company has support for TV Guide and you're willing to risk having some headaches, this unit may be for you.

4) On the other hand, regardless of the TV Guide system, as other reviewers have reported, the fan on this thing is loud and stays on all the time! Turn the unit off, and the fan still runs!

The older RD-XS32 was almost a rock star. Why Toshiba completely got rid of the manual recording features of that unit on the RD-XS34 is beyond my comprehension. Why there is no way to turn off the TV Guide features on the XS34 is also mind boggling, especially when dealing with the very new, not well-tested TV Guide system.

I returned the unit and will not purchase a unit with TV Guide unless they work out the bugs on it and provide a way to download their program information without having to use cable, satellite or telephone. I think TIVO decided to eventually go the LAN route. Maybe TV Guide will in the future.

I will also be hesitant to buy a Toshiba product in the future and you should be too. For the time being, JVC has a unit without TV Guide and you can still pick up the Pioneer DVR-520H without TV Guide. They lack the coolness factor of the on-screen program guide a la TIVO or a working TV Guide, but having used the older Pioneer DVR-510H, I know the system works well without hassle.

My one star rating should be zero but there is no option for that. If the unit had the option of manual timer recording, the star rating might be closer to a four based on my experiences with the XS32, but since I couldn't test any of that, the unit was a $500 boat anchor.

Update: One month after I called Toshiba techincal support (returning the product a week after my call), TV Guide support called to help. Wow! How responsive TV Guide is. If you have a problem with TV Guide, they'll get back to you in a month! No, really, avoid this product.

Please don't put down this recorder when you either are technologically challenged or cannot read the manual. Several people mentioned there is no way to record TV shows unless you use the TV guide, and does not work with satellite. IN THE MANUAL, it explicitly explains how to record shows manually. You can set the device to record at a certain time just like a VCR, at whatever quality you want and whatever medium (DVD or HDD). To record from your satellite, set your satellite receiver to tune to hte appropriate channel, and go into the TV Guide feature. Then, go to schedule, then hit menu twice, and it will bring you to the manual record option. Or READ THE MANUAL! Just wanted to let everyone know.

I think this product is unfairly rated very low by some frustrated users. Actually I could have been one of those who gave only one star, because in the begining, it did not seem to work at all. Now I have owned this machine for over a month now, and I really love it.

I did a fairly complete research before purchase, and among the comparable products from SONY, TOSHIBA, PIONEER and PANASONIC, I chose this one, and I believe I made the right choice. The negative reviews are mostly targeted on the EPG systems. But if you have problems with EPG on XS34, then possibly you will have more headaches with all other manufactures with EPG. Contradictary to what people said, it is quite easy to just use the Time Recording (like you do on VCR) with this unit. It is true that it is not an easy job to manually re-set the clock (and I think Toshiba should consider improve on this), but you do not have to manually re-set. Leave it there for 24 hours and it can pick up the right time through over-the-air broadcast (which is exactly the case I had). I guess it could only be a problem if you live in an area where you do no have any over-the-air broadcasting, in that case, you need to contact the Toshiba support for firmware upgrade.

The DVD recorder is fairly new thing in our life, and fairly complicated compared with VCRs. Most users who complain are the ones who just purchased the product and before they adapted to the new way of operating the machine. Once you become familiar with the unit, you will feel a lot happier and the more you use it, the more you like it. Each product has its strength and weekness, but comparing with the cost and overall quality (picture quality, ease of use, edit function etc), XS34 is a very solid product in my opinion.

This is in response to the problems S. Rys and Dan J. Grams said they were having. (Unfortunately, I don't have their e-mails to answer them directly. Perhaps the good people at Amazon can forward these answers to them.) S. Rys said the it was slow to change channels. It does take a few seconds if you just punch in the channel and wait, but if you punch in the channel and press the "Enter" button, it changes immediately. Now for the much more difficult one. This one wasn't in the instruction manual, I found this quite by accident. Dan J. Grams said he didn't like the fact that you couldn't program a show manually. Well, I found out how to do it. While you have the TV Guide page on, press the "Menu" button on the remote. The "Episode Options" window will appear on the left side of your screen. Move up to and select "Go To Service Bar." You should be at the top of your screen now. Move over to the right until "Schedule" is highlighted and press the "Menu" button on the remote again. The "Schedule Options" window appears on the left side of your screen. Move down until "New Manual Recording" is highlighted and press the "Enter" button. You're there, enter the recording info and enjoy! The only shortfall about doing it this way is it won't name the recording you made the way it does when you use the TV Guide.

My VHS recorder has been on its way out for a number of years and I wanted to replace it with something that gave reasonable quality video recordings without wearing out or chewing up tapes. A DVD recorder seemed to be OK but I had visions of producing a stack of beer coasters as I recorded material and then discarded the DVDs. A HDD seemed to be an ideal complement to a DVD recorder and after a lot of online searching, I decided on the Toshiba RD-XS34.

I'm very pleased with this recorder apart from two things:

The TV Guide is totally useless and is even disruptive to normal viewing (for me, anyway). Although it was not easy, I eventually found a way to disable it. It is a feature that is designed to make life easier for users by presenting them with a list of all programs being broadcast over the next 8 days. It did not make life easy for me or the rest of my family and we were soon cursing it. I use Charter Cable and, although after about 4 days, it finally managed to identify all the stations, no programs were listed (yes, it was left switched off for 24 hours). As the stations totalled a few hundred - all with no information - it was not very useful and seemed to be a pig to navigate anyway. The main problem was that it needed to continually scan the cable box to download these (non-existent) programs. It did this while the unit was off which meant it was impossible to watch any TV with the unit off because it kept changing channels on the cable box. The makers cleverly designed it so that if you left it on, it would turn itself off automatically after 3 hours and start its scan again. This unwelcome scanning could be fixed by disconnecting the IR Blaster from the cable box but that meant that it could not change to the right channel for recording. Even trying to set a recording manually involved jumping into the middle of this mess too. Eventually I set up the TV Guide by telling it that no cable box was connected - and, wonderful news, the horrible TV Guide reluctantly seemed to go away. Unfortunately the IR Blaster is now disabled too. I see this situation as being a very major issue for this unit - everything looks good and works well except this! I'm still working on this but may send it back!

The second problem is that although the unit has 3 video inputs, my unit won't let me select any except Input 1. I have an antenna connected so I would like to use the in-built tuner but so far, I can't find out how. (Update - the input selector for some unknown reason suddenly started to work as expected)

The picture quality is reasonable - not as good as the original signal but far better than VHS tape. Operation too, seemed straightforward once the TV Guide was disabled. I haven't seen any in local stores so I suppose I must be an 'early-adopter' for this type of this device. I would expect the technology to improve dramatically as newer units come out. Actually, the hardware is fine - a simple means of disabling the horrible TV Guide yet still allow operation of the IR Blaster (and making this option the default) would have sufficed.

I see some other reviewers have reported problems in reading CD-Rs, JPEGs etc. I've used CD-Rs with JPEGS and have had no problems on the RD-XS34. I know from previous experience with a Toshiba DVD player that it was very sensitive to brand of media. I found that CDs with the bluish dye seemed to work better than those with the greenish dye, so I already had a stack of them for this unit.

UPDATE:

After about 3 weeks, the TV Guide is sort of working so I suppose some patience is needed in using this system. The TV Guide still changes the cable box channel when it scans the stations while the unit is off - very irritating. A good improvent to this might be to allow the user to specify a time window for such scanning. The TV Guide is still very cumbersome to navigate as the stations seem to be ordered rather randomly. It's very slow because it displays the current TV program in a window - it takes about 5 seconds to select each one on the cable box so scrolling is almost impossible. I still think this whole user-interface is a mess but it appears to be working as designed.
For some obscure reason, the video input selection started to work too.

Basically, this is a really good idea with such serious design flaws as to make it unusable. The final straw for me was that it corrupted all my dozens of hours of recorded programming, making it useless. A Google search on the error message ("Playback failed. Previously recorded data might be corrupted.") shows that I am far from the only person to whom this has happened. There is no excuse for such a poor level of reliability, nor is this by any means the only serious problem with the unit. My recommendation is to stay far away from the RD-XS34 and by extension its sister unit, the RD-XS54.

I mentioned the serious reliability issue, but there are deeper flaws at the design level. The unit cannot intelligently handle the presence of a cable box AND a tuner. Channels simply cannot be edited on an individual basis to switch them over from a line-input to the TV tuner. And the tuning of the cable box is highly unreliable -- e.g., when trying to tune to "14" it actually tunes to "4". This almost always happens and I am convinced it's not simply a problem with the placement of the IR transmitter, it's just a flaw in the box.

You can get around the above by telling it there is no cable box, which requires that you manually set up a line recording when you want to record off the cable box. This alone wouldn't have been a huge deal for me, but for some it's a showstopper.

Another problem: good old Digital Rights Management enforcement. For example, I recorded an LP from my turntable into the line 2 inputs with no video feed and it refused to copy the recording to DVD because it was marked "never copy." I would say that detecting a copy-protection signal where none could possibly exist is a real problem for a unit like this.

There is another reliability problem: the unit sometimes simply does not record programs marked for recording, particularly when they are marked for "regular" recording. I've lost a few programs -- none I especially cared about, but that's not the point -- due to this issue.

Attempts to contact Toshiba about the problem have failed. So add poor customer service to the list of issues.

Bottom line: stay away from this unit until Toshiba works out the bugs a little better.

I was originally hesitant about purchasing this recorder after reading all of the reviews. I eventually gave in. This feature rich Toshiba model seemed to be the best buy out there. It has been a few weeks now and I am real happy with this model. The first few days of set up were a perplexing experience. The manual is hard to follow at times. Some sections are not clear at all about explaining the task at hand. I do recommend reading the entire manual at least once before figuring out how to use the remote and unit by yourself. The channel line-up that was downloaded was in a much different order than what I previously had through my cable box. I spoke with Toshiba's tech support and they mentioned that this is common. The tech support people are very helpful by the way. I decided that I could get used to the new line-up and I did. Setting a recording and playback is very easy and the resolution is quite good at SP. I love the time-slip feature. Burning a program or movie onto a DVD-R is easy with very little loss in picture quality.

Now for the negative comments that most people want to read about first. The hand held remote control is very slow in responding to channel changing (about 2-3 sec). Surfing through the TV guide line-up is also slow. There is no mute button on the remote. You cannot watch one channel while recording another without first installing a splitter. I have noticed that some of the very negative reviews given to this model were by people without much patience. For example, deleting a previously recorded program is easy. Just read the manual, it's in there. I also found no problem with the so called "fan noise". Yes the recorder does stay on all the time, even in stand-by mode, but the on going fan near the rear of the unit is not that loud. It is actually quieter than my PC fan.

So I gave this model a five star rating because I found that the pros greatly out weighed the cons. Just give this feature rich recorder some time and you will appreciate it more and more. And you can't beat the price!

UPDATED APRIL 3
Rikki H on March 24 mentioned, "Dan J. Grams said he didn't like the fact that you couldn't program a show manually. " Where in my review did I say this? He must of confused me with someone else. This recorder is very easy to use and yes it is easy to program manually. I still think this is a very nice unit and it is still the best buy out there. My brother recently bought the JVC DRM100S DVD Recorder and now wishes he would of bought this Toshiba model.

After reading numerous reviews, I finally took the plunge and ordered the item from Amazon.com. Unfortunately, the unit never made it to my front door, UPS lost the package somewhere between their local office and my house! Their website is still showing it as out for delivery - a week later. I ended up buying it at a local store for a little less than Amazon was selling it for.

The RD-XS34 is a wonderful DVD Recorder. It has the feel of a well built, quality unit. The user interface is pleasant and recording, playback onto HDD is straightforward. Editing recorded content is a breeze and chapter points are created every 5 minutes (configurable to 10 mins, upwards). Importing from a DV Camcorder via firewire is painless and chapters are created automatically. I've had no problem burning DVDs.

The only downside to this recorder is the user of TVGuide On Screen. This does not control a satellite receiver, thus you have to program your satellite receiver to switch to a channel at a particular time and also program the DVD recorder to turn on and record (from Line 1 - in my case) at the same time.

In order to setup a manual recording, you have to navigate through the TV Guide On Screen interface - which seems as though it is a completely different piece of software running on the machine.

All in all, this is a wonderful machine.

I originally received the RD-XS34 DVD Recorder on March 1, '06. When I connected it, it wouldn't set the correct date or time, and it wouldn't download any data for the TV GUIDE, even after 48 hours. I couldn't set the date or time manually. I called Toshiba Customer Service, and was told that they would send me a firmware upgrade for the TV GUIDE. I asked them if that would fix the problems and was told that it would allow me to set the date and time manually. Meanwhile, I contacted the seller and he arranged for me to send it to the Toshiba Repair Center in Massachusetts. They performed the upgrade and returned the machine to me. It still did not work, although I could now set the date and time manually. I called the repair center and they had the machine picked up and returned to them and they replaced a circuit board in the TV GUIDE section, then tested the machine. It set the time and date automatically, and also downloaded the data for the local cable service. The TV GUIDE functioned properly for them. They returned the machine to me.
I connected it and it set the time and date correctly from my cable, however, after shutting off and sitting for over 24 hours, the machine would still not download any data for the program listing. I waited another 3 days, still no data.
The clock worked properly for 5 days, keeping time to the cable. I know this because I also have a Panasonic DVD HDD recorder which also has the TV GUIDE feature,and the TV GUIDE works properly on the Pansasonic machine. The two machines sit side-by-side. Both clocks showed the same time and they both changed at the exact same second. Like I said, this lasted 5 days. On the sixth day, I noticed there was a few seconds delay on the clock on the Toshiba. It kept losing a couple seconds each day for a few days, then it stayed about 20 seconds slower than the Panasonic.
I called the Repair Center and was told that they would not repair the unit again and referred me back to Toshiba Customer Service. I contacted them and asked them to exchange the machine for one that worked properly. At first, they said that they would not replace it, but changed their minds and finally sent me a replacement.
The replacement will not set the date and time from my cable and it will not download the data for the program listing for the TV GUIDE, just like the first machine. I contacted Toshiba and they referred me to their person in charge of the TV GUIDE problems. He called me and we tried some things with the machine, but nothing helped it. He then told me that he would have someone from TV GUIDE contact me. About 10 days later, someone from TV GUIDE did call me. After some conversation, he said that he thought that my cable service was at fault, that they were not sending out the data in a format that the Toshiba TV GUIDE could read and download. I explained to him that my Panasonic unit has the TV GUIDE built into it, and it works flawlessly. He then stated that the Panasonic unit has a "Version 7" TV GUIDE, and the Toshiba unit has a "Version 8" TV GUIDE. I would expect that the newer version would be "backward compatible" with Version 7, but it is not. So I have a cable service that is sending out the data and my Panasonic unit reads and downloads the data, but the Toshiba is incapable of doing this.
The person from TV GUIDE contacted my cable service and later called me to say that my cable service told him that they had corrected the problem and that my Toshiba TV GUIDE should work properly now. Well, it still doesn't work. It still won't set the date or time, and it still won't download any data for the TV GUIDE.
I contacted Toshiba Customer Service again and told them about the problems and I asked them to have my unit sent to their repair facility to test it. I feel that it is defective, and as far as TV GUIDE, it's almost as if I am just getting some double-talk. It just doesn't make sense to me if the TV GUIDE on my Panasonic unit is working flawlessly, but the TV GUIDE on my Toshiba unit doesn't function at all.
As far as the other functions of the Toshiba unit, they all work properly. It is a great recorder, has great editing capabilities. It copies to DVD properly, etc. I have no other complaints EXCEPT the NOISY FAN.
I want to mention that the customer service people, repair center people, and the person from TV GUIDE were all very courteous and pleasant to talk to. I had no problem with any of them.
UPDATE: Aug 22, '06 My TV GUIDE started working today. The problem was tracked down to my cable service not sending the data in the proper format for the Toshiba. I originally bought this machine in early March. It has taken all this time to get it to function properly. I want to upgrade my rating for this machine to very good, except for the noisy fan. Everything else works great now.