Home > Consumer Reviews > Toshiba W608 4-Head Hi-Fi VCR

This VCR provides excellent picture sharpness and clarity. The RW/FF speed is also excellent. My favorite feature was a complete surprise: VCR reads sub-channel info and on many channels will display the name of the current program onscreen, even during commercials!

Programming and timer recording leave something to be desired however. There is no way to record a show more than once (ie every day, once a week). In my area VCRPlus channels do not match what the VCR thinks and requires manual mapping of VCR channel to actual channel.

This is one of the better VCRs on the market. It plays back tapes with a very good image and has one of the best pictures around. This machine has Quasi S playback for tapes recorded on Super VHS machines. That's an excellent feature that gives you great versatility. I can record Super VHS tapes on my living room VCR but I can still play them back on this standard VCR in my bedroom. Pre-recorded tapes play back with an excellent picture too. How good a picture looks is what it is all about.

This is one of the best VCRs I have seen lately. Frankly, this machine replays VHS tapes giving one of the best pictures on the market today. I saw one of these while shopping. The picture was excellent. The color alignment looked good on the Panasonic Super-flat TV set it was being played on. Resolution was excellent. Usually a good TV set makes VHS tapes look bad. That was not the case here! I just thought I would share my reaction.

Toshiba is a great brand, but something that might be hard to tell from these online photographs is how wide this VCR is. Toshiba's always boasting about its "full component width," which is good if you stack your VCR atop a DVD player or a digital cable box, but if you put it on its own shelf, it's huge. You're paying for lots of empty plastic, just so the VCR can be the size of a pizza box.

Unless you are really, really good at programming this kind of thing on your own, the frustration of trying to understand the setup instructions for this machine may have you wanting to just return it and start over with something else. Understandably, there are several ways to configure your VCR, stereo, cable box and TV - but there must be an easier way to show how to program the VCR. And the one vital step we needed in order to time tape was missing altogether (we figured it out just before I started looking at the return instructions). I had also emailed Toshiba at one point when we were really confused - it took them a week to answer me (and it was the wrong answer).

Now that it's set up, the machine itself seems to work fine and the timer programming is relatively easy. Just check your patience level before you buy.