Customer Reviews

Toshiba SD-V394 DVD/VCR Combo

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

 

 

I couldn't afford the DSM-520 from DLink, and my family still used VHS (very retro). I saw this, and the DivX label caught my eye. So I bought it. Then I looked at the reviews, which were scant and negative. I decided to open the box and set it up so I could add a review for others.

My buyer's remorse has been appeased for these reasons:

1. It plays AVI's from CD or DVD. I have a library of DivX and Xvid, this plays them all from either CD or DVD! I haven't found, yet, what it doesn't play.

2. Easy to get up and running. Interface is a piece of cake. My fam has no problem with it.

3. Front inputs.

4. Great sound and options (basic, but enough).

5. Great picture even with compressed AVI's, DivX and Xvid.

6. Codec library is plenty sufficient. Burn any AVI to any media and it plays. (any that I've tried, so far.)

Improvements? The volume level between VHS and DVD is pretty drastic. VHS is loud, DVD needs volume (but sounds fine).

Contrary to another review, the display is fine for me. Easy to see. Maybe they didn't remove that sticky shipping film. I don't know.

How long have I had it? 2 days. Will update if it gives out.
How much? Best Buy $105, but I see they go for $79 here.

Don't let the reviews (or lack of..) deter you. If you are an AVI person (you know what I mean), this one will do it for you.

Update: 12/18/06
Still going strong. I use the heck out of this machine. Remember, there is a "DVD only" version of this for cheaper (without the VCR). As with any player, use the button to eject and close the DVD tray. This minimizes the loss of tray functionality.

Another very cool feature of the DivX player portion is that you don't have to Fast Forward through a DivX or Xvid, you can use the "Jump To" feature, and jump to the general place in the show that you want to watch. I skip the long intro to Band of Brothers, for example, and jump to the 2:25 time (I memorized the exact place at which the show starts, and jump to it).

Cheers.

I bought two of these units, exactly one week apart. I liked the first one so much, I bought a second one for the family room. 6 months later, almost to the day, the DVD drive on the first unit stopped working (I had to take the thing apart to extract the trapped DVD). One week later, on the second unit, the VHS tray began seeing a tape even though none was loaded which meant I couldn't load a real tape. So, 6 months after buying two combo units, I now have one DVD player and one VCR.

After searching around for an inexpensive VCR (not satisfied with the DVD recorders currently on the market) to replace my broken Panasonic VHS, I decided to take a chance on this Toshiba combo unit. Considering the price, I was pretty impressed by the build quality as I was pretty much expecting something that would look and feel cheap. The outside case for example felt sturdier than housing on my last two Panasonics (just touching it lightly would make creaking noise) and the tape insertion mechanism didn't feel like it would break (unlike my last two Panasonics where the holder would wobble and often times have problems pulling the tape in properly).

As for recording, this unit records in either SP or SLP (kind of wished it had a middle EP mode). SP playback quality is very nice but naturally, means only around 2 hours of recording time on a T120 tape. SLP gives me 6 hours but the recording quality is ok at best. Playing back tapes recorded on my previous VCR's is hit/miss as even with the automatic tracking (it still has difficulty resulting in occasional jitters or noise at the bottom).

Since I didn't buy this for the DVD player, I only tried a few disks (just to make sure it worked) including a home video recorded onto a DVD+RW and had no problems with playback or quality.

The remote is on the smallish side but at least most of the buttons are layed out decently and has separate eject buttons for both the DVD and VCR.

There are just a few minor annoyances I had with this unit which caused me to dock one star. One is that the display counter always takes precedence over the time whenever the unit is powered on (at least there is a clock/counter button on the remote to switch between the two). Also, to do timed recordings, you need to remember to press the timer/rec button (most other VCR's I've had in the past just required turning it "off" (i.e. standby mode). One feature I really miss from my Panasonic recorders was the tape position indicator display. I now find myself occasionally ejecting the tape to check how much is remaining (I record in a mix of SP and SLP so it is hard to gauge by the display counter).

I've had this for almost a month now and have used it everyday to observe what kind of experiences I would have before writing this review. For the price, I'm pretty satisified and it probably has exceeded my expectations since most VCR's nowadays aren't that great quality. I'll add in update in a few months to cover how reliable it is.

The vcr was broke after 1 week of owning it. The company did replace it and I didn't have to pat for shipping it back.

I bought this for my grandson to watch DVD's and Tapes and it still works great. He's only 4 so I don't imagine he is very gentle with it. The people that are not satisfied expected more out of a low priced unit. I bought the cheapest unit I could find and for the money, it does exactly what I expected it to do. It has great sound, great picture, and is easy to use and set up.

After less than a year of limited use, the picture changes from color to black & white. The problem occurs intermittently, and it is completely random. I did not purchase an extended warranty plan because for something less than $100 it seemed silly. But after limited use for something like this to happen just screams out 'JUNK' to me.

Great product and well worth the price.If you hook up the component video outlet your dvds look almost like HD.

The DVD player works great with my HD TV.
I only give it 3 stars because the vhs player will not work with a HD TV(I called Toshiba after trying to get it to work-and that is what they told me)

Title says it all. DVD just stopped working after 6 months. No matter what disc you put in, the machine said "no disc." This is too bad because the machine perfectly fit our needs.

I called Toshiba Customer Service, sent the old machine to them, and in two weeks had another machine. However, the machine they sent me was a DIFFERENT MODEL from the one I purchased and it lacked some of the features I needed.

So I called Toshiba again. This time they sent me a prepaid shipping label which I used to mail this machine back to them. In two weeks I received a check for the purchase price of my original machine!

We have been very pleased with our purchase. I found reading the previous reviews to be accurate and very helpful. Very easy to hook-up, will work on old television sets, DVD and VHS work well, VHS is more noisy when rewinding. We bought this for our children to watch movies and just use the most basic features, so it has suited our needs well. If looking for all bells and whistles would probably choose higher end model, but if looking to stay simple and basic I would choose this model.