Toshiba Rd 85DT Dvd Hdd Recorder
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Information DVD Recorder / HDD Recorder, 1 Disc, Progressive Scan, Virtual Surround, Dolby Digital (Digital out only), DTS (Digital out only) ... Pros + DTS Surround sound. + Progressive scan. + Built-In Hard Disk. Cons - No HDMI connection. The Toshiba RD 85DT Recorder HDD Recorder is a DVD Player. . Key Spec Toshiba Rd 85DT Dvd Hdd Recorder Review If the Toshiba RD-85DT DVD Recorder / HDD Recorder had an RGB-enabled scart input for Sky and cable boxes it would hit the nail right on the head, giving you everything you could ask of a HDD DVD recorder. However, it doesn’t, so it really is up to you whether you are prepared .. Read Full Review |
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Toshiba RD-85DT DVD Recorder / HDD Recorder Specification Core Features
Ask A Question About - Toshiba Rd 85DT Dvd Hdd Recorder Toshiba owner! 1st August **… overlooked the analogue tuner… replyWho watches analogue once they have DTT? **…I-Link… Dubbing of camera material is best left in the ‘den’ using my PC - I don’t want all the wires etc in my lounge thank you very much. **… RGB-enabled Scart and S-Video… It’s a Freeview machine so I wont be connecting to $ky. I suppose you can link your old VCR to transfer materials, but I doubt if you would notice the difference between composite /RGB. **…player automatically whacks subtitles and interactive banners (on recordings)… I’ve had no banners and subtitles on my recordings - perhaps I’ve adjusted the settings correctly. Perhaps you should have mentioned: The DVB tuner is excellent - it copes very well with marginal areas and does a fine job muting and ‘softening’ the effects of interference. The ‘killer reason’ for selecting Toshiba over Panasonic has to be the ability of the 85DT to record aspect ratio information correctly to the DVD-R. Panasonic informs that “All material recorded onto DVD-R/DVD-RW (Video) will be flagged as 4:3 and will not contain WSS.” With the Toshiba I can take my DVD-R to a relative and it will play back correctly on a standard TV; with the Panasonic I get squashed playback (for widescreen recordings). The 85DT is by no means perfect; the DVB tuner assumes you have a 16:9 TV and some of the menus are clumsy. However these can be forgiven when you consider the fine tuner and aspect ratio preservation. Unbeatable Staff 2nd August Great Comment. Thanks for the in-depth owner feed back. replyDave 6th August Mr Tosh owner, replyI currently have an LG 7800 which is faulty & is to be replaced. Can you please tell me if on the RD-85DT you can watch a recorded prog whilst you are recording to the Hard Drive ? With the LG, it's possible to record to either the Drive or disc whilst watching from thr drive. As i said I'm looking for something to replace the LG with. Cheers. Toshiba owner. 8th August Hello Dave. Yes, while recording DTT to Hard Drive I have watched a DVD. Here’s some more…. I’ve been starting to record from my VHS recorder. The Aspect ratio settings are a little tricky… my first thoughts are that reliable 16:9 recordings are made to DVD-RW (then dub back to HDD) but if you try to record to HDD the 16:9 soon reverts to 4:3. ** This could be the output from my recorder though**. Playback: An interested neighbour brought ‘round a recording (made on a supermarket recorder that died after a week) on a Tesco DVD+R… after a couple of setting changes it played back OK. It wouldn’t play back a Ritek DVD+RW (PC-Nero recording); it records and dubs Datawrite 2x speed DVD-RW OK. Have found that high speed dubbing to Datawrite Titanium 8x DVD-R results in unplayable disks but ‘to-fit’ dubbing (rather slow) seems OK. General: The Fan’s a bit loud once the machine is taken of the carpet - but I’ve got used to it. Hope that helps! (Thinks…I’m in danger of becoming a salesperson for Unbeatable/Toshiba). replyDave 13th August Mr Tosh owner, replyWhat I asked was :- Can you watch a 'hard drive' recorded prog, at the same time as you are recording to the hard drive. NOT, record & watch a dvd. With the LG, I can start recording to the drive, then press menu & watch prog from either source. Have you tried this ? Dave. TonyB 13th August This is a message for Dave, I can't post directly as his post is still awaiting moderation. The answer to your query is yes, you can play back programmes on the hard drive whilst recording to that drive at the same time. The playback can be a separate, previously recorded programme or the same programme that you're recording. If you go to toshiba.co.uk you'll find the user manual there so you can check out the machine's operation in detail. replyRalph 7th September on the toshiba RD85DT dvd recorder with freeview how far ahead can you see programmes with the EPG replyTonyB 10th August Good review, except for one thing: replyI had to read one particular passage a few times to make any sense of it, and it still didn't make sense until I'd read another review elsewhere! Quote: It’s also got all the desirable connection (sic) like a component-video output, RGB-enabled scart and S-Video. You may have noticed that an RGB-enable (sic) scart wasn’t in that list (my comment: yes it is!!!) and you are probably just as disgusted as we were. End quote. Hmmm! I can’t believe such clumsy writing would have got through but it has. I now know what the writer is trying to say: that the machine has an RGB SCART output to connect to the TV but there is no RGB SCART input to record from an external Sky box. Please could you have another look at that paragraph! I'd be interested to hear more about machine noise. Panasonic and Sony are praised for being quiet in operation, and I'm a little concerned that the Toshiba is unacceptably noisy. Tom 24th September I am thinking of buying a Toshiba rd-85dt. The spec looks good and the price is OK. However one of the reviews I found said that iy was noisy in operation. My last DVR was a Phillips and was really noisy when switched on - so much that we had to turn the sound up on the TV. Fortunately it broke down fairly soon and I managed to get my money bac, but I dont want to buy another noisy box, any comments / feedback would be very useful replyDave 25th September Tom, I took the plunge last week & exchanged my faulty LG with this Tosh. I was a little concerned about the fan noise issue also, so before I sent the LG back, I paid attention to its fan noise. I can say there's very little between them. I probably notice it more now 'cos i'm conscious of it, but I wouldn't regard it as a negative. replyHope this helps.If you have any further Q's, post them. Dave. Martin W 23rd November For those who may be hard of hearing...When recording a TV prog can the RD-85DT record subtitles? replytom 24th November I have bought a 85DT recorder. There appears to be a problem when recording two consecutive programmes using the guide to select them both. If you select one programme it is OK but when you select the second it says there is an overlap and the you have to manually deduct one minute off the end or start of one of the programmes to make it work. This is so stupid it must be something I am missing in the setup. Has anyone else experienced this and is there a fix? replyrobin 3rd January Actually, this is just a 'warning'. What happens is that it will stop the first recording a minute early, and then start recording again. A bit stupid really, because you get the end of the first programme at the beginning of the second recording! replyRobin 31st December I'm suffering from the aspect ratio problem with this unit: I have a treasured B&O 4:3 TV, and whilst my previous Freeview box (costing £30) worked perfectly with it, with this Toshiba (costing 7x as much) most of the digital channels appear vertically stretched when viewing live TV. replyNow, there is a 'TV shape' setting in the menu, but it only applies to HDD/DVD playback. So, if I use Timeslip all the time when watching live TV then the aspect ratio is correct. In other words, if I want a correctly-shaped image I have to constantly record live TV, which frankly seems ridiculous (not to mention Timeslip takes 5 seconds to go into action, and you can't change the channel while it's operative). Other things to know about this machine before you buy it: you can't record one channel whilst watching another. The fan seems rather loud if you're not used to having a unit with a fan, but it's tolerable. What the machine does, it does very well (and it's very simple to browse the guide - which goes 7 days ahead - and select programmes to record). It's a shame they just decided not to bother accomodating 4:3 TVs (if I'm wrong, and anyone knows how to fix this, please let me know!) TonyB 3rd January Pity about the fan noise - that was one of the main things that put me off when I was looking for a DVD recorder, as I'd seen other people mention its loudness. replyThere seems to be a lot of confusion around regarding how many channels equipment like this can record at once, or whether you can watch one programme and record another. If a device only has one tuner then it can only be tuned to one channel at a time, so multi-tasking with different channels is not an option unless you have two tuners within the device. DVD recorders, with or without hard drives, do NOT have two tuners. Maybe they will in the future but not at the moment. There are significant technical and cost issues to be overcome first. Therefore if people want to buy a machine with two tuners they need to look at dedicated PVRs - these are hard drive based machines with no DVD aspect at all. Some are more sophisticated than others, allowing the recording of two different channels at once, whilst the more basic only offer the ability to record one channel whilst watching another. Such machines include the Humax 9200 and the Topfield and Sagem ranges, or Sky plus if you have satellite. The user could also buy a cheap DVD recorder without a hard drive for archiving recordings from the PVR and playing back DVDs. Re. the aspect ratio problem - you should be able to set the default aspect ratio in the DVD recorder menu so that it knows what type of TV you're using. The TV shape setting seem to be something you'd set on the fly rather than as a default. There may be a menu option such as ‘video’ or ‘picture’ which might allow this. penny 3rd January I have recently been given a gift of a RD-85D recorder. Could anyone tell me if it is possible to copy video tapes onto disc. replyMark B 3rd January I have just purchased on of these, but it doesn't seem possible to record a tv programme onto the hard drive and watch another freeview channel at the same time. The ""guide"" button says its not availiable when recording. This is possible with my current Sagem HDD I have. Is this really the case??? replyMany thanks for your comments TonyB 4th January Yes it is the case because the Toshiba, in common with all DVD recorders (with or without hard drives) only has ONE tuner. replyHard disc PVRs such as your Sagem will have two tuners built in, meaning that you have more flexibility with regard to watching one live channel and recording another at the same time, or recording two different channels at once. It's important to check the spec of equipment before it is purchased to make sure it does what you want :) If people want a twin tuner device then they will need to buy a hard drive PVR and then have a separate DVD recorder/player for copying things from the hard drive or playing back DVDs. As you've already bought your Toshiba one way round your problem is to buy a cheap Freeview box (less than 30 pounds) or even one of those SCART receivers which is a tiny Freeview receiver built into a SCART plug - you then use the Freeview box or plug to watch Freeview channels on the TV whilst the Toshiba is recording something else. Mark B 4th January Many Thanks for your advice TonyB - ok I am a muppet, but have I got a decent thing?? replyHappy New Year! TonyB 20th January Don't worry Mark - the Toshiba device is a good machine in most respects, very flexible to use and well designed. replyHowever, there is one important issue to flag up which may or may not be important to you: although it has a SCART input for recording from external devices such as a Skybox the SCART is not RGB enabled. What this means is that the picture quality of signals recorded through this SCART will be okay but not as good as they could have been. Some people who wanted to buy a recorder like the Toshiba to archive recordings to DVD from their Sky plus were annoyed by the lack of RGB and this put them off. If you don't anticipate recording from an external digibox then the lack of RGB isn't really an issue. Also, I can't remember whether the Toshiba has an input for camcorders or not but if that's important to you its best to check. It might be too late now of course as it’s been a couple of weeks since your query. Sorry for the late response but I didn't get a notification of your message for some reason. Alan L 20th January Can anyone with this machine explain the banner/subtitle situation ? replyDoes this mean if i burn a dvd from a recording it will automatically put a banner or subtitles in the recording. I read above someone saying it doesnt but he didnt mention burning the recording to dvd ? Many thanks Al paul russell 31st May I have a tosh 85 & a panny 75 and i must say the panney wins hands down on ease of use and features,a couple of things that really annoy me about the tosh is that there is no instant record botton(rang tosh to verify this) also there is no pdc so if the program starts late or over runs it only records at the set time,and also i have a tosh lcd tv and the remotes aren't even compatible this is unbelieveable even though the tv remote has a dvd button on it!!! replyKIM 3rd March My father has had a tosh RD-85D for about 18 mths but only now wants to record to disk, but when I try to initialise a DVD- RW disk it says ""no disc"" and try as I might I can not find out what the problem is, also because of something he's pressed it takes about 2 mins for any disk to load, so I was wondering if there is a ""master reset"" button, or if its broken? Many thanks Kim x replyKIM 3rd March My father has had a tosh RD-85D for about 18 mths but only now wants to record to disk, but when I try to initialise a DVD- RW disk it says ""no disc"" and try as I might I can not find out what the problem is, also because of something he's pressed it takes about 2 mins for any disk to load, so I was wondering if there is a ""master reset"" button, or if its broken? Many thanks Kim x reply |
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Progressive Scan.
