10
Sep
09

Toshiba DR420 DVD Recorder


This unit is really great! We recently got a 40″ HD TV and needed a replacement for the VCR — we wanted to record shows (and On-Demand movies) at a good enough quality for HD viewing.

One option was DVR from Comcast for $10/month (which might or might not allow recording of On-Demand movies and transfer to computer for disc-burning). Another option was using a computer with a video acquisition device and record to hard drive. The third option was this unit for $110, delivered, from Amazon — hands down the most practical choice.

Though this unit doesn’t record in true HD resolution, the quality is about the same (in 2 hour mode, 16×9) as regular 16×9 enhanced DVDs. At first I was worried the recorded discs might not play on other DVD players; but they did, no problem at all on any of our equipment (that is, after the recording is finalized). The recording time for a DVD-R disc (on high quality mode) was 2 hours and 8 minutes. (On lower quality modes, it’s 4+ hours and 8+ hours.)

Navigating the menu system is easy enough, and each recorded disk is given a simple menu with the various recordings available to choose from (which by default have the date & time of recording as the title, but can be renamed).

Upconversion of commercial DVDs is quite good (enough so that we’re not that motivated to get a Blu-Ray player yet ;-) .

Our only complaints (which are very minor) are that the tray-eject is a little slow & noisy and that there isn’t component video inputs (just composite video & S-Video inputs). But it was easy enough to hook up to our cable box (or TV) to record from their outputs.

This will be a great unit to have until Blu-Ray recorders become less expensive.

Features
* Records -R/-RW, +R/+RW Formats
* Playback:MP3, VCD, JPEG, Kodak Pic
* 1080P Upconversion and DV Input
* Auto-Finalization
* HDMI connection

Toshiba DR420 DVD Recorder


0 Responses to “Toshiba DR420 DVD Recorder”



  1. Leave a Comment

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s


Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.