Fantastic DVD player for a knock-down price (Toshiba SD 100)

Member Name: Crazy-Christian

Product:	Toshiba SD 100
Date:	14/07/01 (710 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: It laughs at VCRs!

Disadvantages: I'm still thinking...

The only thing better than getting your first DVD player is getting your second one - ‘cos now you’ve got something to compare it to!

My first player was a Limit (no, I’d never heard of them, either) as recommended by Richer Sounds. It fitted my budget of £200, so I took it home. It did the job very well until it came unstuck with my "Chicken Run" DVD; it kept freezing at a certain part and I was informed that it was a generic problem with that model. The one they offered me in its place was the Toshiba SD-100E.

Personally, I couldn’t care less about the look of my audio/video equipment, but for those of you who do, it’s rectangular and comes in silver or black: I took the silver one. What more can I say?

Thankfully, it’s a very easy piece of equipment to connect. This is something with which I usually have enormous problems but DVD players are very user-friendly. I just hooked up the scart lead to my player and the back of the DVD and I was ready for business. (There is only one scart output on the back of the player, and there is also a video/S video out jack, analog audio out (l/r) jacks, and bitstream/pcm coaxial and optical audio out jacks - hope someone understands that!) Usually, a scart lead is not included but you can buy a basic one for about a tenner or a good one for £20. Luckily, I just swapped over the one from my old machine.

The front panel is quite sparse. Apart from the disc tray and the display, there is an on/standby button, pause/stop/play buttons, an open/close button and a couple of skip buttons. I prefer a less busy front like this but it could limit you if you lose your remote - so don’t!

The display has a useful feature in that you can dim the brightness; one press for dim, two to make it disappear: useful if the luminescent glow annoys you. Also, the display shows the elapsed time of the DVD you are watching: I only mention this because th
e loan machine I had, didn’t do this and it was very irritating.

The owner’s manual is very informative and just as user-friendly as you would wish. There is actually a second book covering several continental European languages which you can compare and use to learn another language! Although, in my experience, using the phrase "Improper use of batteries may cause leakage and corrosion", even in French, is not a particularly successful chat-up line!

It contains a very good section on connecting to different types of equipment. As I only have a Dolby Pro-logic TV it was very straightforward, but if you have a more complex system there are instructions and diagrams to show you how. This also means that the quality of sound is limited to my system but it sounds very good and is clearly better than my previous player. The reviews I read also suggested that the sound quality was good on more advanced home cinema set-ups.

The quality of picture is, for me, one of the main attractions of buying a DVD. If you’re fed up with your video tapes deteriorating after just a few years, then switch to DVD. The picture is much sharper and will not diminish over time. I gasp every time I play a DVD on this machine, the image is just perfect. Another great benefit is the pause function - it actually freezes the picture rather than leaves it doing a little dance as on most VCRs. This is useful if there is a document or something a character is holding that you need to read - I’ve previously been unable to do this due to the lack of quality and clarity of my old VCR.

There are three speeds for fast-forwarding (x 2, x 8 and x 30) which makes it really easy to search through a movie. It also has a useful playback from the same location function so that if you have to stop in the middle of a movie it resumes from the exact scene where you left off. This doesn’t work if you power off the player, but it does if t
he player powers off automatically if you leave it on "stop" unattended for a while. My other machine didn’t do this and it is useful to know.

The remote control is quite small, which I like, and feels quite instinctive, so you get used to using it in the dark quite quickly. The "enter" button is surrounded by the direction buttons and is a little bit tricky to use for those of us with thicker fingers. Still, not much of a complaint, really, is it!

There are loads of buttons on the remote relating to lots of useful functions, like zoom, subtitles and menu: the latter takes you into the menu on your disc and the direction buttons move you about through the various choices (in case you’re new to DVD - these menus vary enormously). Of course, many of them depend upon the discs you buy, so you may not get to play with the "angle" button until you get the right disc! This is one of the things I found weird about DVD; the fact that not all discs and players are 100% compatible, which is exactly the problem I found with my original machine. Make sure you clarify with the seller when you buy that there are no known problem discs. As newer discs come out with improved technology it is possible your machine may have problems playing these. I’m not aware of any for the Toshiba.

You can also play audio CDs on this player but I was loathe to do this. Hey, they make dedicated CD players for that sort of thing! (Sorry to be snobby!) The reviews do state that the quality is okay but not great - but what did you expect?

I had to agree with all the reviews about the sound and vision quality, but they did state that it was sparing on extra features. I’m not sure what they mean here as it does everything I could ask of it and is definitely better than the Limit player I had before.

This machine originally retailed for about £300 but was on sale for £210. (I got it for £200 because of
the problem with my original player.) My player is a multi-region one but make sure you need this facility - if you are not intending to buy a lot of imported discs you can get a Region 2 player for around £30 less. The seller will give you instructions on how to play a Region 1 disc - these are very simple. As yet, I haven't actually bought any Region 1 discs to try them out as the UK releases are often of equal quality these days, but I still intend to get some.

I can’t find fault with this player. I’ll admit I haven’t seen a high-end machine yet, to compare it to, but if something isn’t broke - don’t fix it! I would recommend it to anyone especially if you haven’t taken the step up yet from VCR to DVD. Digital Versatile Disc is here to stay!

Summary: