Toshiba D-R2 DVD Recorder

I received this recorder as a gift about 6 months ago. With it's built-in TV tuner it is capable of direct off the air recording of antenna or cable channels. It also has enough direct inputs for satellite boxes, Video cameras and VCR's. It can record on just about all media combinations including -, +, and RAM discs. Although it can record up to 6 hours, I found the video quality drops off badly after 4 hours. The instructions are lengthy and take time to digest all the information an owner needs to know to operate this machine successfully and properly. The remote control is essential as most operations are done from it and are not duplicated on the body of the machine. There are many remote control buttons making it tough to back up this remote with a universal learning remote . When disks are placed in the tray, it takes about a full minute for the head to read and check each disc before the machine allows any operations. After using the machine for a while I found some "quirks" that the machine pops up with. After a time, I found out what to do and this is a "VITAL" part of this review. On the TV screen the machine would sometimes pop-up with a dialog screen saying "This disc is unreadable due to damage or dirty." The message is a generality and mostly not properly correct. My experience was that the DVD read and write lens was actually dirty. The message got very often after about 50 hours of recording and sometimes it would properly burn a disc and then claim it was an unwritten disc. Here is the cure that I discovered. Get a CD or DVD lens cleaner disc. Be sure it's the type with at least 6-8 brushes mounted on it. Run it on "PLAY" through the recorder at least 3 times. Then try to record your next disc . I found it cured the problem. Also if you have a disc that did record but was not finalized and the machine doesn't see that it recorded, save the disc. Run the cleaner disc as I described and then try again to finalize. That should also work. My overall suggestion is to run the cleaning disc two cycles each 15 hours of usage. This should help control disc errors to a minimum.
The 4 hour or less recordings are quite good and I've tried them on several players with excellent results. I have just located and ordered a wet type cleaner but will not attempt to use it unless the dry type no longer produces the proper results. Wet types can be tricky. This I learned from VCR experiences.
One last note: If recording off satellite , many movies have a copy guard built in which forces the Toshiba to give you a dialog box that says it can't copy it. The only work around is to purchase a copy guard breaker like the Sima "Go-Video" after market product.
For unrestricted video like cam corder or home recorded VCR tape, the Toshiba works fine without add'l gear. Tricky involved instructions. Very sensitive lens. Disc loads slow. Very good quality records to 4 hrs. Wide variety of media. Built-in TV tuner In addition, timer records REQUIRE an additional 10 minutes prior to the disc starting to burn. EXAMPLE: set the timer for 9:00pm-11:00pm movie. At 8:50pm the machine turns itself on and prepares the disc. It means you can't set two timer records if they aren't at least 11 minutes apart (a second timer record would have to be at least 11:11pm or later).