Toshiba RD-XS32

Summary: I loved it to start with, but just before the warranty ran out it started failing to read half the discs in my collection - including ones it had burned itself! Took it to the nearest Toshiba agent and he replaced the main circuit board (or so he said).

Then a couple of weeks later, when the warrantee had expired, all the audio failed; it wouldn't record audio, wouldn't play audio, everything was silent! This time the agent took about a month to fix it, and charged me more than half of what i paid for the machine in the first place.

A couple of months after that, it started failing to read discs again, and yes, this included most of the ones it had made itself. This time when I took it into the agent's shop he told me that these recorders are such rubbish, they just aren't worth spending the money on. He suggested I throw it away!! I'm now using it as a door-stop.

And as for Toshiba support - forget it! They live on Mars; why should they worry about what happens down here on Earth?

Summary: I've always tended to like Toshiba products, and this was no exception for the first year. During this time, I recorded tons of hours onto virtually any brand of blank DVD-RW media without any problems. Eventually, however, my DVR got 'Panasonicitis' - uncanny failure right after the warranty expired. It didn't fail completely, but it suddenly started requiring many attempts to successfully record a DVD or to even format a new blank DVD - of any brand. Cleaning the lens didn't seem to help much. Now I'm careful not to accumulate too much 'good stuff' on the hard disk because who know when or if total failure will occur.

My main complaint about it from the start has been its very slow write speed for DVD-RW - only 2x. It is often hard to find disks that are not 4x, which will not work on this unit. Also, often the DVDs I create will not play on other peoples' DVD players, even though they are supposed to play DVD-RW disks.

Otherwise, it has a lot of nice features and the user manual is a bit better written than those of many consumer electronics.