Customer Reviews

Toshiba SD-V295 Tunerless DVD VCR Combo Player

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

The unit itself worked fine and seems like a good value for the price. BUT. The remote control requires a full 5 seconds after you press a button before you can press that button again, or any other button. That's a long slow count of 5 in between button presses. The manual warns of a delay in the fine print, but 5 seconds for each button press? It would have taken me a week to set the clock!

Perhaps my particular unit was an outlier in this regard (can they all be like this?) so if you want this product you should probably check out your exact unit right at the store before buying.

Picked this up from BestBuy last night - should have thought twice as there was one on the shelf that had been returned already. It does not come with a tuner so without a cable or satellite box you're screwed.

My television lacks RCA jacks so I have an RCA/Coax converter. So far so good but the annoying part that I can't figure out is that I have to move the cables from VCR OUT to VCR IN when I want to record something, then back to VCR OUT when I want to watch!

The DVD part worked fine, no real problem there, picture quality looks good and the VCR recording quality looks great. The remote is a joke. You have to press combination keys to get things to work and it was very confusing to learn. It also hates to leave DVD mode. You cannot turn off the DVD side and only focus on the VCR ergo you'll be programming a timer or something and suddenly you're in DVD mode!

The other model at BestBuy was the Sony SLV-D380P. As far as I can tell it's just as bad but with an extra $10 Sony markup!

This is exactly what we needed and it works just the way that I would expect. We have had it for several weeks now and we watch movies and shows with it daily. It hasn't given us a moment of trouble and let's face it; vcr's are not as easy to find as they use to be.

I don't see any other product like this being a better deal than this.

I haven't had this very long, so I can't comment on it's reliability, just it's function. It works fine as far as recording and playback of VHS tape, and the DVD is good. I esp. like the DVD feature that remembers where you left off viewing a DVD. When you power the unit up, it starts right where you stopped the DVD. Great for those 3 and 4 hour movies it takes 2 (or 3) days to watch. The function indicators for DVD or VCR are tiny little boxes on the unit, and are both the same color. I wish they would have just made them different colored lights, or 1 led for VCR and 2 for DVD or some such...of course you can tell which function you're on if the TV is on, but if you just want to eject a disk or tape, you have to be right in front of the player to see which function you've got. The remote control is the big problem with this otherwise nice deal. It's only 6" long and 2" wide, and the buttons are tiny, and the print by the buttons is microscopic. And you can see the labels for the DVD functions OK (barely), but for the VHS functions, they used a dark mustard colored print that is awful to try and see. You need to keep a flashlight handy, which (along with the tiny buttons) kind of takes away that "braille" method of getting used to your remote. Luckily, I had a larger remote from another Toshiba DVD player I own. It's cream colored (as opposed to black, like the new one) and has big, easy to read labels, but I still have to use the new one for the VCR. So why the tiny remote for this job-ee-do? I don't know. Also, on the remote, they put the REW and FWD buttons right in between the SKIP FWD and BACK buttons, so you try to go for the rewind or forward on a DVD, and end up skipping froward or back a whole scene! Very painful! And also, they put the SLOW button up and right, away from the other play buttons, NEXT TO THE OPEN/CLOSE button, so there's more potential fun. Remember, it's tuner-less, so you can't hook it up with your coaxial cable, it has to hook up directly to a cable or satellite box. You need one of those 3 lead cables, with two audio and one video, which, by the way the cheapskates don't provide with the unit, so don't forget to get one. Well, otherwise, it works well, is inexpensive, and is pretty.

Deliver was as forecast by Amazon.
This replaced my previous Tobshiba VCR and DVD player. Operation was integrated and much simpler than with the previous two pieces of equipment. Installation was almost nothing. Plugged it in as described in the summary sheet, turned it on, and all worked without a problem.

I didn't have the problem with the 5 second delay. BUT this unit has no recorder and if you want to record content from your TV you MUST connect this through your cable BOX. There is no way to hook it up directly to your cable wire. Which was no big deal except I had to play "musical" DVD players because I bought it to put in a room with no cable box.
The picture quality is fine and so far it works well.

This has been the perfect solution for us. I needed to replace an older model VCR/DVD combo player that died and this has been a great replacement. Yes, there is no tuner, but we do not need one for playing DVD and VHS tapes on my daughters television. The packaging and all other info on this unit clearly states there is no tuner so I do not understand some folks confusion there. The remote works just fine no issues and playback quality has been wonderfull. It would be nice if the VHS and DVD could both be hooked up through S-video, but this is a minor issue and if you read the specs before purchasing you know this. All in all this has been a great unit for the inexpensive price. If all you need is something low tech to play your VHS tapes and DVDs on a non-HDTV then I would recommend this unit.

i bought two of these. one as a gift. both have worked great for about a year. it is clear the unit does not have a tuner. the greatest thing about it is it plays divX files. burn a set of divX files to a dvd and insert it. you get a menu of all the files, select one and it will play, turn off the machine and when it restarts it will go right back to where it left off. this means you can put as many as seven divX movies on a single dvd, and play them as you like.

for me the weakest thing is the black face on the remote which makes it awful to see in even semi-darkness.

the remote is not 5 seconds slow on either of the two purchased. and the reason i came back here is to price another one for another friend who saw mine and wants one of their own.

I bought this to have a means to play CDs, DVDs and VCR tapes in one compact box. I haven't even used the record function, and probably never will. I just wanted a VCR drive in there to play any "legacy" tapes I still have lying around.

It works. The picture quality is good. But...

1. When you insert a CD or DVD, it takes the drive a long time to figure out which it is and start to play it. I'd say about 30 seconds, and that is unacceptable.

2. Once it recognizes a CD, it automatically starts to play it. Often, I don't want it to do that. I want it to just load and be "ready", and let me possibly skip to the track I want. With the "auto play all the time" behavior, I constantly have to make sure the volume is down, stop it, advance it, turn the volume back up... AWKWARD.

3. The front panel controls are very limited. There is no pause button, and the FF/RWD CD controls advance through the current song, but there is no separate "skip" button. The remote control has all these functions, but I loathe devices that depend on the remote control as the only source of certain important functions. That has been the trend to cut costs on these cheap units, because front panel controls are expensive compared to putting them on a remote.

I also don't like the "standby" type of power switch. How about just "On/Off".

In short, there are too many hidden/automatic/nonavailable/weirdly labeled things about this that make it awkward to use. I will probably never buy a combo drive in the future if I can help it, even if I have to hunt down generations-old devices on eBay to get a separate CD player, separate DVD player, and separate VCR. They work much better that way and have controls that humans intuitively understand.

DO NOT buy this machine. I purchased mine at Best Buy in late July, watched exactly one DVD on it, and now it won't play anything, anywhere, anytime. I tried resetting it, hooking it to 3 different TV's, hooking it through different cables, and nothing. The display counter goes to 00:01 on both the DVD and VHS sides, and that's it, nada. Toshiba only has a 90 day warranty, and since we don't watch many movies, I'm SOL. Doubt if Best Buy will do anything either. Total garbage