Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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232 of 236 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great recorder and player, June 14, 2008
We have had the recorder about three weeks. I am over 50 and completely new to video recording although considered the techno-twit in the family. The main reason we bought a recorder is because we have about a hundred Hi8 two hour tapes of our family adventures around the world some of which are 20 years old, and I needed to transfer them before they turned to dust! The reason we picked this unit were the price and the reviews on several websites. I had bought computer software and hardware back in 2000 and found it quirky,unreliable, poor quality and agonizingly slow to render. I gave up for a few years and decided to wait for the right standalone recorder. I had considered sending them off to be transferred, but that was rather expensive and might disappoint.
Setup and playback:
Set up with the HDMI cable to my 52" 1080p LCD TV was a breeze. Upconverting to 1080p with regular DVDs is superb! A very noticeable improvement over my regular player. Subtle details and colors we never noticed before seemed to jump out at us. The manual and menus were about what I expected with a new technology to learn. The manual is adequate, better than Sony manuals. The menus were confusing until I experimented a bit and looked up some terms online. I am still learning them.
Recording:
I set up my old Sony Hi8 camcorder to it with the S-video and audio RCA cables. We have a Sony Hi8 standalone VCR that needs repair thus using the camcorder for tape playback. I setup my first DVD+r recording for two hour SP mode and nothing! A coaster! But it showed by the color change on the back that it recorded , just no video on it. After reading the reviews that said they got nothing but coasters I began to hope that it was just a beginners mistake and read the manual again. After playing with the menus I realized that I might have not selected the right input. Got it set and tried again. Voila! It not only recorded but the combination of the superior Hi8 source, and this recorder and the image and sound quality were fantastic! Hi8 records in PCM sound so the audio was perfect!
I immediately tried it in my Sony dvd player because I read several reviews that said it produced DVDs that were only playable in that machine. Sure enough it would not play in it. So I tried it in all three of my computers in my home network, two desktops and a laptop. It only played back in one of them.
I double checked the menus on the recorder and I sure enough had it set to auto finalize when full or with the timer??????
So I hit the manual again and it dawned on me that perhaps it only would auto finalize when the DVD could hold no more, or when a timer was set. It has been my experience with CDr data and music recording that once you remove the media nothing more can be done to it. But just to try I took the recorded DVD and popped it back into the recorder and manually finalized it. It worked!!!!! I learned that I have to finalize every DVD, it would only finalize automatically, under those two specific conditions, full or on timer.
Now the same DVD that I took out and would not play in but one other computer played perfectly in the Sony player and all computers I tried it on. I even took it to work and played it on our five workstations and the network server I administer, and perfect playback on all!
I suspect the folks producing coasters and incompatible DVDs did not RTFD (Read The Freakin' Directions!)
Last week Office Depot had a sale on 100 pack Memorex DVD spindles for 24 bucks. I bought one to experiment with the features I am still not clear on. It appears that even with a DVD-r or +r I can pause and resume without losing the recording thus being able to edit out manually in real time things I don't want to keep. I haven't even gotten into title and chapters, I just set it to auto set chapters every ten minutes, so I can easily find specific items to view quickly. I have a catalogue of every tape and they are numbered, and I just have to revise the content from feet of tape to chapters as I transfer them in the word document I have them listed in as the numbers will remain the same for each DVD.
I give it 5 stars because all technology manuals are terrible and adequate is the best I can expect. As well, the menus will take some experimenting just like the first time using any new technology or software.
This is an excellent recorder with lots of hidden features and capabilities. If you RTFD and play with it.
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73 of 73 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
DOES THE JOB, April 29, 2008
I used this tunerless DVD recorder to convert my small collection of VHS home movies to DVD+R discs. It took several weeks, and the recorder did the dubbing smoothly and glitch-free. If you are using composite cables from VCR to DVD recorder, try not to use the cables that come in the box. I saw a slight but noticeable improvement in picture quality when I upgraded from the superthin video cable provided with the unit to a General Electric shielded cable I purchased from Target several years ago.
Well though it may record, the D-R410 is not perfect. If a large part of your viewing diet consists of material recorded with video cameras (e.g., TV programs on DVD, music videos, and concerts), playback on this unit will not yield good results in progressive-scan mode at 480p: you'll see distracting video artifacts such as uneven edges on diagonal lines. Moreover, the motor makes a ticking sound that some people might find annoying. Because of these issues, I wouldn't consider this recorder a bang for the buck.
Nevertheless, if you have a collection of videotapes that you'd like to convert to shiny plastic and the tapes aren't copyright-protected, this is an inexpensive, disposable machine that will effectively do the job.
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117 of 121 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great price, good performance, but some issues, April 11, 2008
This is an impressive upconverting player and a good recorder with automatic finalizing. But the consumer should be aware that the instruction manual is 100 pages, the remote is poorly laid out and illegible in dim light, and the claim about Regza compatibility may be exaggerated (important to me since I'm using it with a Regza HDTV). The player permits the user to provide the proper settings--480, 720, 1080i,1080p--which, moreover, are illuminated on the face panel. If you have an HDTV capable of 1080p, be sure to set the progressive scan rate in the recorder's menu system. At the same time, be realistic about what to expect. Like numerous other reviewers of "upconverting" DVD players, I notice very little difference in picture quality whether I'm using this Toshiba model with HDMI connection or a 4-year-old "cheap" Sylvania player with component cables (resolution seems equally sharp with both). No doubt the improvement becomes more noticeable as the size of the screen increases (though there's something to be said for counterclaims that the processing of non-HD discs occurs in your HD television set regardless of the converting/up-scaling or non-converting player providing the source signal).
My Sony DVD player remote operates my Sony television set and includes a volume control. The Toshiba remote not only excludes the volume control but something as basic as the off button is a mere stump in a forest of surrounding buttons on this player's user-unfriendly remote. Toshiba TV remotes, on the other hand, are generally of high quality and include DVD player control, but make sure yours is compatible with this player. Finally, the Toshiba, like the Sony, is wired with a copyguard sensor. So far the copyright protection seems to be less sensitive and more forgiving than Sony's (unlike Sony, Toshiba doesn't produce and market its own movies and commercial audio recordings).
This may be the least expensive DVD recorder available, and the workmanship, apart from the shabby labeling of the remote, strikes me as solid (just be aware that the machine is double the thickness and weight of many upconverting player-only machines).
[Update: This Toshiba model gets high marks for playing difficult discs. I have a scuffed copy of "Oklahoma" that repeatedly freezes and gets rejected by a new Sony upscaler as well as a Mac Superdrive. To my surprise, it played without a hitch in this Toshiba.]
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