Toshiba DST 3100 first review

Toshiba announced its coming about a year ago as COMING SOON. They said how glorious it would be.
O.K. I bought one yesterday with the money that I originally spent on a SONY SAT HD 300. I went through several Sony units and Sony did a buy back. When the Sony worked it looked good. The Toshiba on the other hand, in my opinion is not worth the cost. For $200. less you can get a now functioning LG3200 .
Toshiba announced that the 3100 will output video signal from all outputs all the time, no it wont!
In set up we have user menus that allow us to choose stations we don't wont to see or be seen unless the station is a terrestrial station, they cannot be blocked.
I also found I needed to reset the brightness and contrast levels using the Toshiba, unless of course you like a very dim picture. Also there is no gray bar option to lessen the possibility of CRT burn. The date code indicates my unit was manufactured last month in Mexico, which leads me to think it was not made by Toshiba as Toshiba is a proponent of HDMI and this unit uses DVI. Lastly Toshiba has not overcome their heat problem, this unit has a noisey fan that is always on. Save your money...

 

Toshiba has asked me to return the receiver to their service dept, at my expence of course, for the problems I have mentioned above plus several more. The graphics are simpley blurry on both a HD and SD screen. Logos for TBS and Animal Planet are totally unrecognisable blurrs and reading the small print from the 3100s graphics reminds me of how well I see with my glasses off. The 3000s graphics were far better.There is also a line of video noise atop a SD picture seen on a HD broadcast. I have invited Toshiba to respond to these problems.

 

I came home today to find a unused replacement unit from Toshiba. Within 30 minutes I was on the phone to Toshibas 888 number. The only thing different about the replacement unit was that it did not have a noisy fan. The party I talked with at Toshiba had a 3100 in his office and found their unit also to be laking in ability to edit , lack of gray bars, the line of video noise, and software dated 1,999...

 

I was Informed this day that Toshiba America is offering to buy back my DST 3100 for the price I paid for it...

 

I was Informed this day that Toshiba America is offering to buy back my DST 3100 for the price I paid for it...