Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 174
 Toshiba RD-XV59DT DVD & VHS PLAYER July 12, 2010
Mr. Alan R. Coffey
This is a very good player/recorder and I am very satisfied with this product with a good price.
An excellent service from the supplier.Thank you.
 not good July 8, 2010
anon
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Toshiba RD-XV59DT DVD & VHS Player with Freeview+ 250GB Hard Drive Drive - Black
bought this in April 2010,checked all reviews,which seemed good.
however on 07/07/10 it has failed,no power,not very good for a supposedly reliable product.
contacted Amazon (call centre in the phillipines!) told me how to arrange to return it,but not about how to get money back on extended warranty.
further call to Amazon resulted in me being told to contact warranty issuer and tell the I don't want warranty!
not happy,this is amazons job not mine.
Will no longer use Amazon as very unhappy about chain of events!
 Toshiba Hard Disc/DVD/VHS combi RD-XV59DT June 29, 2010
Derek J. Alden (East Yorkshire)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Upgraded from Samsung analogue DVD recorder and very satisfied.Excellent picture quality.Programming is quick using the on-screen freeview guide. As others have said, instruction book is somewhat convoluted but practice makes perfect. One niggle :- once the machine is set for recording, the cooling fan stays on (but all indicator lights go off) until recording is finished which seems a bit uneconomical and risky if you should want to set it to record a series whilst on holiday. Contacted Toshiba about this who did not seem to understand the point I was making and just said it's designed to do that. Otherwise 5 stars would have been awarded. In reality I usually only record "same day" stuff. If I can work it in my 70's others should have no trouble!
 Good features, but flawed. June 27, 2010
Kerry Marshall (Britannia)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
As others have said, a nice unit packed with features. Very nice to have the hard drive to record on. No more searching for discs with space on them. And the ability to edit a recording on the hard drive is also excellent - allows you to remove commercial breaks before committing a recording to a disc.
Another nice feature is the "Resume On" facility, which remembers your place in a recording on the hard drive if you quit viewing before the end, even through powering off. Prince Charles will love this! He complained that while VCR tapes enable this naturally, the problem with DVDs is finding the point where you left off.
But the unit is let down by the following:
* On-Screen Disc Contents Menu:
On my 8 years-old Panasonic DVD-recorder (DVR) the onscreen disc-contents menu consists of 6 thumbnail pictures per page, underneath each of which is the recording's title. The thumbnail is user-chosen, making it easy to identify 6 recordings at a glance. The Toshiba, by contrast, doesn't allow you to choose your own thumbnail, so you get a random picture such as a tree or blue sky, giving you no clue as to the recording's content. Worse, there's no title underneath each thumbnail - you have to move the cursor to each thumbnail before the title is displayed. So if you have 50 recordings on the harddrive, you have to laboriously move the cursor to each one to find the title, and the thumbnail is useless.
I don't know if DVDs burned incorporate these drawbacks, as I haven't risked burning any. I burn from the Toshiba hard drive to my Panasonic, which ensures the final menus are top-notch. Setup I have is SetTopBox -> Toshiba -> Panasonic DVR -> TV
* Manual:
Unless you're technically proficient, you'll find it hard to get going using this manual. Admittedly there are lots of features to cover, but the author doesn't understand the need to pitch a technical manual at those of lowest technical ability. Clearly written by an engineer, not a teacher.
It's also inaccurate. The section describing how to merge two recordings into one lists onscreen menu options that are simply not there. "Title combining" simply can't be done. It looks like someone copied this bit from another model's manual & forgot to check if this model actually has the feature.
* Remote:
The high feature content of the unit means that the remote will be crowded, but why not make it a little bigger? The tiny buttons are hard to use, and the lettering is almost unreadable to anyone without eagle vision - tiny grey on black text - almost as bad as black on black! It looks & feels cheap. Again, my old(er) Panasonic DVR has a solid, quality remote.
The sheer number of excellent features should mean a five-star review, but the unit is let down by its menus, remote, and manual. I would give it a 3.5 star review to be accurate, but since that's not possible, I'm rounding down, since other reviewers have missed out the weaknesses of the menu system.
.
An amazing piece of kit June 17, 2010
E. P. Davis (Kent)
This is a brilliant item, one of the best things I have ever bought. It replaces no less than 4 potential boxes, freeview, VCR, DVD/HDD, and music CD player. And I am delighted with the quality achived in transferring around 300 hours of home video on various VCRs, Sony 8 and Canon DV tapes - now safely on two lots of DVD, one each for us and the children. Anything digitised, anything on tape, it can do. And SO much less hassle than using a PC to transfer home video to DVD. Strongly recommended, every home should have one!
Showing reviews 1-5 of 174
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