Home > Consumer Reviews > Toshiba RDXV48 - 160Gb Hard Drive DVD Recorder & VHS Combi With Freeview

This does exactly what it says on the box! A sophisticated little machine which I bought to supplement our Phillips set-top box and it works perfectly. Our area goes digital next June. Not as daunting to use/understand as some would have you believe and it has many innovative and welcome features that make using it and its operation a pleasure. Only slight niggle is that it is quite noisy (even when switched off and with a timer program waiting to spring into action). Only time it is silent is when completely shut down and not in timer mode. You get used to it though and for this price this is a very minor inconvenience.

I bought one of these as a Christmas present for my father, but with 55 buttons on the remote control and very small text, it proved nearly impossible for him to use (he's 91). Subsequently I had to buy him the Panasonic Multi Format DVD Recorder With Freeview which has larger buttons and not as many, plus a supply of Panasonic 3x speed, 4.7GB, 10 pack DVD-RAM Disc as it has no HDD. I am now using the Toshiba.

The Freeview is good, although there is only one tuner. I have the outside aerial plugged into a Humax 160GB Twin Tuner PVR (which has two tuners, Freeview and a 160Gb hard disc), and from there to the Toshiba. This way I can record everything I want to watch on the Humax and everything I want to transfer to DVD on the Toshiba. I can also watch another channel on the Humax while the Toshiba is recording, because with only one tuner on the Toshiba you have to watch what it is recording or watch something it has recorded earlier.

The Freeview EPG is a small box in the middle two thirds of the screen and in extended mode will only show six channels, although it will show eight days worth. It's easy to set the programmes to record; just highlight the program, press OK, press OK again, press return. It sometimes cuts off the first minute of the program if it starts slightly early; I cannot find anything in the manual to change this. You cannot access the EPG if it is recording something.

I am mostly happy with the hard disc, as it records programmes without any of them breaking up or pixelating. When going to the menu showing the recordings, it highlights the first one and starts playing them, with sound, in their own little box; this can be a little bit irritating and makes them slow to move across to find the one you want to play. When zooming through the adverts, it sometimes does not respond to the first press of the play button and carries on zooming through the programme, causing one to have to zoom back.

When playing DVD's I find it to be as good as any other player although it is not multiregion.

To copy from the HDD to DVD I use Verbatim DVD-R 4.7GB 16x Printable 50 pack. It has a facility to edit films & TV programmes (i.e. removing the adverts and the stuff at the beginning and the end) before dubbing. If there are two episodes of the same programme, it can stitch them together so they become one programme; make sure you stitch them together before editing though, because if you edit them first it won't let you stitch them together afterwards. On some TV programmes you record onto the hard disk, it will not let you edit if you have watched the programme; you need to edit the programme and then watch it, or copy it and then watch the DVD. Also, on some programmes it will only let you make one copy, though you could probably duplicate them on the PC.

Also, if you want to copy from HDD to DVD in widescreen you will need to use DVD-R disks, because if you use DVD+R disks it will always copy the program in 4:3 (like TV's used to be) and you will get black bars at the side of the screen; unfortunately the DVD-R disks that you record may not be viewable on other DVD players (they cannot be played on a Sony DVP-NS36 DVD Player), though they can be watched on a PC.

The video part is okay and has both auto & manual tracking, although if your tapes are old there will still be a lot of interference (there is on mine). I would imagine its main use would be to copy from video onto DVD something treasured from a camcorder. I think if I wanted a film on video to be on DVD, I would buy the DVD and throw the old video cassette away as it will not transfer well.

I have found that if I have been watching a DVD and switch it off, the next time I switch it on the DVD will start up and I then have to wait until it has gone through the titles before I can stop the DVD and switch over to HDD; this is not good if you are in a hurry to record something.

Another thing that annoys me and which has been mentioned by other reviewers, it the cooling fan. It is the same noise as a PC cooling fan and it is always on, even when the unit is on standby. I bought an enclosed TV stand with glass doors and I can still hear it. Do not buy this if you are going to have it in a bedroom, you will never sleep.

Unless you really need a video player for copying to/from, I would recommend the Panasonic Freeview 160GB HDD & DVD Recorder, which is similar to the one my father has now but also includes a hard disc.

I had one when it came out.....broke down a week later.It refuses to power up at all,and is now being replaced free by Amazon. That's great, but everything on the hard drive is now lost (including the VHS tape and DVD stuck in it). Some things will be hard to replace. It was great while it lasted. The worst thing about it is the clunky menu. It's awkward to watch anything (on the freeview or DVD,or anything you are dubbing) because it automatically switches to AV2 (where it says you must plug your DECODER, e.g SKY box) and it makes an awful sound if you don't.So to be clear, if you have anything plugged into AV2, that's the default that you will watch when the machine is on, like it or not.To watch your recording or Freeview you have to turn off the SKY box! I'm sure i've read it right,and followed the instructions, but this part of the system is very stupid. You can get around it, but it's a pain. The editing function is more clunky than my Funai HDR-B2735, which is faultless and frame accurate in editing out adverts. In some ways the Funai is better, but it doesn't have RGB in or out, unlike the Toshiba. Other than that, and it breaking down, it's got alot of good features. I just hope the replacement works for more than a week this time!

UPDATE: The new replacement came this morning and this unit is better. It no longer screams at me when i change the input from Sky (in AV2) to the other inputs or the digital or analogue tuner. This unit will let me watch other inputs, i no longer have to turn off my Sky box. The original unit must have been faulty at the factory.At the moment it looks good and i hope it lasts. I don't want to send it back, i like the machine and it's features.

UPDATE 2: The more i use it, the more i'm glad i bought it. Even though things went wrong with the first machine i had, it really is a very good machine, i'm getting used to the menus and the editing is better. I think it was hard at first because my first one was faulty. If your thinking of buying one, i would recommend it. I'm not sure if you can watch VHS through the HDMI. The instructions seem to say not. I think you can only watch HDD/DVD through HDMI. You may still need to have a Scart connected to view VHS and Freeview, i haven't tested this but the instructions seem to say this, i could be wrong. The only other thing i miss is S-VIDEO in/out.

I started looking at combined DVD-VCR machines to reduce the clutter around my TV and also enable me to transfer my Mini-DV video tapes onto DVD. I was using a Sony DVD player, an old VCR and also a Sagem PVR sitting on top of my 12 yr old Panasonic CRT.

I wanted a machine that could play and record onto DVDs and VHS but that also had a freeview tuner. I was also after a machine with a hard drive to make editing DVDs easier and to enable me to replace my PVR at the same time.

At less than £200, I think this machine is superb value but it has its problems. Here are my annoyances in order of frustration. Only time will tell if they outweigh the value:

1. You can't access the programme guide or list of timer recordings if you are recording. This is really frustrating as this includes times when you are using it to perform time-slip (more about that later). So, you pause live-tv, get a drnk, come back and resume play but now you can't see the EPG or set up a program to record because the machine is now in Recording mode i.e. it is chasing playback.

2. Pause-live TV is very un-intuitive - nowhere near as good as my PVR, mainly because you have to press the time-slip button twice - once to start recording the tv programme and once to then pause it. My PVR continuously records the previous 30 mins so you could always pause and rewind up to 30min but this isn't possible with the Toshiba, unless you have pressed timeslip to start recording. Very hard to explain to my wife, who is already missing the PVR.

3. With time-slip, it treats the programme you have paused as a normal recording. So, your hard drive and your recorded programme list will fill up with programmes you have paused (!)

4. Menus are very unintuitive and frustrating, requiring you to confirm twice if you want to delete all those recordings where you paused live TV - gets very annoying!

5. Remote control seems very weak. Two meters away at an angle and it won't respond

6. EPG is frustrating in Week view, with no feature to step forwards a day at a time; you need to step through every programme for one day to move to the next day. Obtining information about programs also requires two clicks - with my PVR the programme information was automatically displayed when you highlighted the program

7. Accessing your list of recordings is poorly laid out, choosing to display the first frame of each programme on the screen which you then scroll through, with the title of the progrmme displayed at the top when the frame is highlighted. If you want to quickly review all your recording to choose what to watch, how many programs can you recognise from the first frame! Would have been more llogical to have a text list of the recordings and a single window to display the recording when you higlighted it in the list.

So, overall it is great value and reduces the machines I need under the TV but despite its hard drive it is very poor replacement if are buying it to give you the PVR/Sky+ functionality. I think Toshiba could have done so much more with this machine by putting a bit more thought and effort into usability - I wonder if it can download new software to fix itself if Toshiba ever employ a usability expert to redesign it...

Over the years I have accumulated seriously large quantities of video tapes from conventional VHS to mini dv's, these are distributed all around the house in cupboards, on shelves ...everywhere!. This piece of kit does exactly what it says on the box. I can transfer/edit to DVD reducing my piles of tapes to a much more manageable number of DVD's. The controls are simple and instructions are well produced and easy to understand. Overall a really first class buy and it arrived bang on time.