Toshiba RD-XS34 DVD Recorder with 160-GB Hard Drive
OK apart from TV Guide
My VHS recorder has been on its way out for a number of years and I wanted to replace it with something that gave reasonable quality video recordings without wearing out or chewing up tapes. A DVD recorder seemed to be OK but I had visions of producing a stack of beer coasters as I recorded material and then discarded the DVDs. A HDD seemed to be an ideal complement to a DVD recorder and after a lot of online searching, I decided on the Toshiba RD-XS34.    I'm very pleased with this recorder apart from two things:    The TV Guide is totally useless and is even disruptive to normal viewing (for me, anyway). Although it was not easy, I eventually found a way to disable it. It is a feature that is designed to make life easier for users by presenting them with a list of all programs being broadcast over the next 8 days. It did not make life easy for me or the rest of my family and we were soon cursing it. I use Charter Cable and, although after about 4 days, it finally managed to identify all the stations, no programs were listed (yes, it was left switched off for 24 hours). As the stations totalled a few hundred - all with no information - it was not very useful and seemed to be a pig to navigate anyway. The main problem was that it needed to continually scan the cable box to download these (non-existent) programs. It did this while the unit was off which meant it was impossible to watch any TV with the unit off because it kept changing channels on the cable box. The makers cleverly designed it so that if you left it on, it would turn itself off automatically after 3 hours and start its scan again. This unwelcome scanning could be fixed by disconnecting the IR Blaster from the cable box but that meant that it could not change to the right channel for recording. Even trying to set a recording manually involved jumping into the middle of this mess too. Eventually I set up the TV Guide by telling it that no cable box was connected - and, wonderful news, the horrible TV Guide reluctantly seemed to go away. Unfortunately the IR Blaster is now disabled too. I see this situation as being a very major issue for this unit - everything looks good and works well except this! I'm still working on this but may send it back!    The second problem is that although the unit has 3 video inputs, my unit won't let me select any except Input 1. I have an antenna connected so I would like to use the in-built tuner but so far, I can't find out how. (Update - the input selector for some unknown reason suddenly started to work as expected)    The picture quality is reasonable - not as good as the original signal but far better than VHS tape. Operation too, seemed straightforward once the TV Guide was disabled. I haven't seen any  in local stores so I suppose I must be an 'early-adopter' for this type of this device. I would expect the technology to improve dramatically as newer units come out. Actually, the hardware is fine - a simple means of disabling the horrible TV Guide yet still allow operation of the IR Blaster (and making this option the default) would have sufficed.    I see some other reviewers have reported problems in reading CD-Rs, JPEGs etc. I've used CD-Rs with JPEGS and have had no problems on the RD-XS34. I know from previous experience with a Toshiba DVD player that it was very sensitive to brand of media. I found that CDs with the bluish dye seemed to work better than those with the greenish dye, so I already had a stack of them for this unit.     UPDATE:    After about 3 weeks, the TV Guide is sort of working so I suppose some patience is needed in using this system. The TV Guide still changes the cable box channel when it scans the stations while the unit is off - very irritating. A good improvent to this might be to allow the user to specify a time window for such scanning. The TV Guide is still very cumbersome to navigate as the stations seem to be ordered rather randomly. It's very slow because it displays the current TV programin a window - it takes about 5 seconds to select each one on the cable box so scrolling is almost impossible. I still think this whole user-interface is a mess but it appears to be working as designed.   For some obscure reason, the video input selection started to work too.