Toshiba DVR620 DVD/VHS Recorder, Black

I bought this DVD recorder to copy many old family home movies on videocassettes to DVDs. Our home movies date back to 1988. After some advice from customer service at Toshiba, I have been able to use the recorder to dub my old home movies successfully to DVDs.

Like several other users, I found that when I followed the instructions for dubbing to DVDs, the recorder showed a "Barred" icon, a slashed red circle. After several attempts with different brands of DVD disks, I called Toshiba. I got some very helpful advice from the first customer service agent at Toshiba, but I was still unable to resolve the problem. I called back and talked to another agent, who was able to help me resolve the recording issues. Both customer service agents at Toshiba were very knowledgeable and did an excellent job of explaining their advice. I was very satisfied with Toshiba customer service. I will summarize the advice below so that other people who have difficulties with the recorder... Read more

I have used this recorder over the last three months to copy all my home VHS tapes to DVD. Previous reviews of other Toshiba VHS/DVD recorders complained about problems with created DVD's playing in other devices. Also complaints of complicated manual instructions and complicated remote controls. I have found this new recorder to be easy to use. The manual is somewhat complicated but easy to follow once you try a few recordings. The remote control was easy to use. There is one HDMI output cable for both DVD and VHS replay. The quality of the replay in standard play speed is good for my recorded DVD's. The quality of store bought DVD's was excellant. The upconvert to 1080 is a good feature. The price was great. Bravo to Toshiba.

I purchased this as a gift so I wasn't able to test out all of the features but I did get to test out the basic ones. First of all the recording quality is very good from the DVD recorder. In XP mode there is no difference in quality between the actual broadcast vs the recording. It looks identical.

The image quality of DVD playback is also good. I did not test this unit with a HDTV so I don't know what the upscaling is like but assume it is at least as good as competing models. The VCR could also record.

The unit's exterior design is elegant and simple and doesn't look cheap. It's not as tall as it looks in the pictures. The front bottom half is a door that flips down to reveal more buttons. The door has a shiny clear finish. This unit is very easy to operate out of the box, it doesn't require much tweaking to do basic functions. The remote is nice too with lots of functions.

The only thing that you should know before you buy this unit is the... Read more