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08 November 2010
Useful machine for copying videocassettes to DVD
I had a lot of old VHS cassettes which were taking up a lot of space so I bought this machine to copy them all to DVD which it seemed to do quite easily. The name "Toshiba" is well known so I decided to go for it. When I first turned it on it kept turning itself immediately off again. It did this about 20 or 30 times until I was getting a little fed up with it, then it decided to stay on, much to my relief. Nothing in the manual referred to this fault and other parts of the manual were not necessarily very clear either. I tried a few recordings, copying tapes to DVD without too much problem but I found that the sound from the tapes kept going dull after an hour or two. Luckily I had a cleaning tape which solved the problem even though the machine had to be "coaxed" into actually running the cleaning tape without immediately ejecting it. Another problem was with long-play recordings. The machine would sometimes play them perfectly and at other times would keep rapidly alternating between long and standard play. Once again the cleaning tape seemed to help here even though the magnetic tape was not in poor condition and played perfectly on a standard VHS machine. One thing to watch is that some tapes will not copy if they have anti-copy characteristics built into them. This is worth bearing in mind if you have a lot of, say, Walt Disney tapes which it will refuse to copy properly, probably quite rightly. The same applies with some DVDs when trying to copy them to tape. It just tells you that you are not allowed to do it. So don't imagine that all will be plain sailing, but if you are copying stuff which has been home recorded you should be OK. The only other fault I have discovered (and still not found the reason why) is that sometimes, after going through the various menus, the picture will decide to break into a mass of zig zags for no apparent reason. This is rectified by switching back to standby and then switching on again, but it is an irritating fault. Overall, I would say that from the point of view of convenience this was a good buy. From a point of view of reliability I would say that the machine I got was well below the standard I would expect from a name like "Toshiba". But most people will probably not return the item if they have successfully copied all their VHS tapes. The lack of reliability does not, in some ways, surprise me because I honestly cannot remember when I last bought a piece of electronic equipment that was completely trouble free unless I go back about 40 years when such items were much better made.