Toshiba SD-V295 Tunerless DVD VCR Combo Player

The thing did well for a while. It has no tuner, but you can run cables from other places. The dvd player often stops in the middle of the movie and no way can I restart it. Other times, it displays just snow. I thought it was a bad dvd but the disk works fine on other players. Toshiba had problems with this a while back, but it is still junk. This will be my last Toshiba product.

I bought this to have a means to play CDs, DVDs and VCR tapes in one compact box. I haven't even used the record function, and probably never will. I just wanted a VCR drive in there to play any "legacy" tapes I still have lying around.

It works. The picture quality is good. But...

1. When you insert a CD or DVD, it takes the drive a long time to figure out which it is and start to play it. I'd say about 30 seconds, and that is unacceptable.

2. Once it recognizes a CD, it automatically starts to play it. Often, I don't want it to do that. I want it to just load and be "ready", and let me possibly skip to the track I want. With the "auto play all the time" behavior, I constantly have to make sure the volume is down, stop it, advance it, turn the volume back up... AWKWARD.

3. The front panel controls are very limited. There is no pause button, and the FF/RWD CD controls advance through the current song, but there is no separate "skip" button. The remote control has all these functions, but I loathe devices that depend on the remote control as the only source of certain important functions. That has been the trend to cut costs on these cheap units, because front panel controls are expensive compared to putting them on a remote.

I also don't like the "standby" type of power switch. How about just "On/Off".

In short, there are too many hidden/automatic/nonavailable/weirdly labeled things about this that make it awkward to use. I will probably never buy a combo drive in the future if I can help it, even if I have to hunt down generations-old devices on eBay to get a separate CD player, separate DVD player, and separate VCR. They work much better that way and have controls that humans intuitively understand.

DO NOT buy this machine. I purchased mine at Best Buy in late July, watched exactly one DVD on it, and now it won't play anything, anywhere, anytime. I tried resetting it, hooking it to 3 different TV's, hooking it through different cables, and nothing. The display counter goes to 00:01 on both the DVD and VHS sides, and that's it, nada. Toshiba only has a 90 day warranty, and since we don't watch many movies, I'm SOL. Doubt if Best Buy will do anything either. Total garbage

Purchased from Amazon thru third party 6ave.com. After less than 4 months of use, it "ate" one of my VCR tapes (could not eject it). Since the warantee is for 90 days only, I am out the full purchase price. 6th Avenue does not consider unusual circumstances - only the miniscule manafacturer warantee. Do not buy the SD-V295KU DVD Video Player & Video Cassette Recorder!!!!!!!!

Toshiba SD-V295 Tunerless DVD VCR Combo Player.
I have never been so disgusted with the setup of this machine. After a month, sometimes it will tape and sometimes not. All the wires are hooked properly, but yet it seems to have a mind of its own. I do not recommend this product.
90 DAY WARRANTY. MINE DIED ON DAY 120. CHANGE THAT TO ZERO STARS.