Toshiba SD370

I already owned the toshsd360 upscaling dvd player which encouraged me to buy the sd370 as i was very happy with it. Im not dissapointed again absolutley no problems with it, plays my divx movies with excellent pic via hdmi & sound thro digital coax. Cant vouch for CD playback. £40 makes it a bargain. I read the negative comments posted here before buying, glad i was not put off. This will do me till blu-ray prices continue to tumble.

Good but with some flaws

I've got the AC version which is identical except that rather than a slave screen it has 2 players that can be linked using the supplied cable to do the same as the AM version or can show 2 different movies.
Really good picture quality but I found it distorts the picture by stretching it horizontally. I couldn't find anyting in the Setup Menu to adjust this. I had to distort all my Divx movies by 1:1.287 Horz:Vert to get the correct aspect ratio. If using the USB you must use a pend drive that plugs directly into the player, using a cable just doesn't seem to work. Make sure the pen drive doesn't have a prominent light because this will be flashing away on the left side of the screen all through the movie. The speakers are a bit tinny and powerless, it's best to use headphones. The infrared Nextbase headphones worked OK but with a lot of background noise, presuamably from the headphones's amplifier; it's probably best to use corded headphones (it comes with in-ear headset but these aren't much use for children).

Good Philips Buy

Maybe one of the newer HDD Philips Recorders on the market with 160gb hard disc space. Looked at reviews for the DVDR5500 which were not totally favourable, so plumped for the newer 5520. My first DVD recorder purchase mainly for the purpose of being able to download DV camcorder onto disc, wedding stuff etc.... but with nothing else to compare it too, I have to say that it is probably as good as any other DVD recorder on the market and being Philips better value than the other big names such as Panasonic and Sony which I also considered with similar specs with a digital tuner.

Pretty easy to set up but nothing in life is as simple as what our expectations would like so of course there will always be some that moan. So be patient. If just connecting recorder to telly for standard terrestrial / Freeview aerial viewing, no problem. If connecting with Sky etc.... again, be patient and read the instructions.

Overall, can't complain about any of the features, and quite pleased with the recordings done both onto the Hard Drive and directly to DVD disc.

I would definitely recommend the Philips DVDR5520H

It Does Exactly What It Says And A Lot More!!

This magnificent beast is what I always wanted and it has saved me a lot of grieve. The Hitachi DV-RV 8500 is a combination of both a DVD and a Video player. This allows the user to not only play DVD's on this machine, but also Videos as well!

There's even more than that as well. The player contains a special burner which if you place in a Blank DVD and a Film on a Video, you can transfer the contents from the video onto the DVD, providing that the Film isn't fully copyrighted. This can also be done vice versa if you have a DVD Film and a Blank Tape!

If you don't think that's enough for you supplied with this player, you can place in Audio CD's and listen to music as well, and it is MP3 compatible as well. It is probably possible to connect a MP3 Player, a Digital Camera and a Camcorder to it as well!

My Grade For The Player: 10/10: Fantastic, Brilliant, Superb

My Wish: There are three things, which are a problem with this player...

1. It is very large to store!
2. It can be expensive, it's price range starts from £250 onwards!
3. If the Lens in the Player gets damaged, you will have to either find a way to replace it, or get another Player. This can be very rare though and will probably only effect if you burn a load of DVD's and Videos!

Final Comments: Like I said at the start, this is a magnificent device and if you are intending to be a little on the cheeky side and burn a few videos onto DVDs, listen to a load of music, or even just to simply watch a Video or a DVD, with enough room provided to store the player, by all means, get The Hitachi DV-RV 8500. You will not be disappointed!

Review By Captain Chris Kipper

Has potential

After purchasing the system it was very obvious how to put the unit together good colour coding makes it childs play when wiring up this unit. The sound quality and picture quality was excellent as you would expect from Sony, unfortunatly thats where the good ends.

After a few months use, the unit developed annoying problems. The unit would lock up making it impossible to do anything with it, until it was unplugged and pluged back in again. That was not to bad as it didnt occur very often. The major downside was that the unit developed static noise after only being on for an hour or so, this increased gradually until all you could here was white noise through all speakers.

Sonys after care was not very helpful. But thankfully amazons was excellent. I am now looking through other reviews for a replacement unit from amazon.

Great value for the money

I have had this machine for over a month now and would recommend it for value and reliability.

Previous models I've owned had one big problem and that was freezing when trying to fast forward or rewind.

So far this machine has done everything it says on the box