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Toshiba SD 290
by louisechackett
I often head to bed when my son does at night, be it to read or to watch a film and so it is pretty essential for me to have a dvd player in my bedroom. When my husband and I split up almost two years ago I had to start again and so I ordered a Toshiba dvd player from my littlewoods catalogue where at the time it cost me £40.00 which I ... felt was a reasonable price for the brand and the fact that I was purchasing from a catalogue where prices are usually slightly higher. The dvd player I purchased was the SD-290 model.
The dvd player arrived safely packaged in a cardboard box. In the box you have the dvd player, the remote control, some batteries and the user manual. The dvd player itself is black with a Toshiba logo on the left hand corner. On the right hand side you have a silver button which is the on/off switch and this is followed by a silver trim right the way across the dvd player. I think this looks nice as the black and silver compliment each other well. Also on the front of the dvd player are black open/close, stop and play buttons as well as the tray which you put the dvd in. There is a panel on the front of the dvd player which lights up when the player is switched on and will show information such as loading or the scene number you are on. It is nice that the screen isn't always lit up as being in my bedroom I would find it quite distracting at night.
Also on the front of this dvd player is a usb slot so you can store photos, movies or music on a usb device and simply slot it in to the dvd player and it would begin playing for you. Whilst I haven't used this function I can see it would be very handy to use.
The manual that comes with the dvd player is pretty straight forward but to be honest it isn't really all that hard to set up a dvd player anyway! I simply plugged my scart lead into the dvd player and the television and I was ready to go. There is no HDMI port on this dvd player so if you are looking to link up for high definition pictures I would say you need to look at a different dvd player.
The dvd player can be quite slow at times in opening the tray to put the dvd in, this seems to be intermittent though and sometimes it works instantly. Another thing with this dvd player I have noticed is that it can be very loud when loading a dvd so there is a lot of whirring or clinking noises which I know comes with all dvd players to some extent but this seems overly loud. It is not an issue in terms of how well dvds play or anything like that, but it is something to note.
The sound and picture quality on the dvd player is decent enough for when I am watching a dvd and I have no complaints with this aspect at all and to be honest that is the main thing I am interested in with this kind of product anyway! The remote control is simple to use although the buttons are quite small and it can be a nightmare hitting the right one when it is quite dark in the room! It is responsive though and I have not had to change the batteries yet and it has been almost two years so I feel that is good going.
I would like it if the dvd player would save the place you were at with a film like some I have owned in the past do, as sometimes I fall asleep during a film and I don't really want to start from the beginning again! Of course I know I can skip through the parts I have seen but it would be a handy function to have it remember where you stopped the dvd and it ask did you wish to start from there.
Apparently this dvd player can also be multi regional if you enter the code 98790 on the remote control whilst the tray is open, however this isn't something I have done as I don't need to play anything but my normal dvds on it!
I think this dvd player is decent for being in a bedroom if that is something you are looking for. I would also say if you are looking for a reasonably priced, simple, no frills dvd player then this would be a good one to buy.
Thank you for reading my review!
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Toshiba SD 1010
by jnic99
I bought the Toshiba SD1010 recently, after reading some fairly positive reviews.
My old DVD player was on its last legs, and making some horrible grinding noises when asked to navigate through DVDs' menu pages. Unfortunately, the Toshiba SD1010 seems to make exactly the same noises.
If you ignore that, the picture quality is ... perfectly fine. But I have two major problems with this product.
Firstly, the awful noise it makes as you move through to the start of the DVD, and secondly the fact that if you have to stop the DVD at any point, then it doesn't resume at the point you left it. This becomes incredibly frustrating. Either you have to pause the DVD, or switch it off and then start again from the beginning (yes, with the grinding sound effects), and then fast forward to the point you left it.
So, in summary, its cheap, its cheerful, it looks fine (I have it in black - not sure if there's other colours), but I would only recommend for perhaps putting in children's rooms, where functionality isn't so critical,and if it gets some tough treatment and gets broken, then its not a disaster.
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Toshiba SD 2010
by blonde_girl774
I managed to survive for a good six months without a DVD player when I moved into my own house, largely because it was one thing I never quite got around to buying and didn't really know what I was looking for to be honest. However when I decided to cut back on none essentials (which meant loosing Sky Movies... sob) I decided I better ... invest in one otherwise my chances of watching a film would be limited to cinema visits only (which were thankfully not classed as none essentials under my new budget). After experimenting with a bargain £10 DVD player from Asda which lasted for all of five minutes I decided it was time to invest in something a little better.
The Toshiba SD2010 caught my eye on Amazon as my television was Toshiba (and I do like things to match!) and I'd always heard good things about this brand. It is currently priced at £27.99 which seemed quite a reasonable price to pay... after the Asda incident I was steering clear of budget DVD players! It came in a rather thin box which advertised the product with a large picture and some more technical information too. I was worried at first that they hadn't packed the DVD player due to the box being so light and so thin; the player only weighs 2.2kg! After unpacking I found the box contained the player, a remote control, instructions and several leads.
Now I did get slightly concerned when I realised I actually had to plug some wires in and connect the player to my television, luckily my dad had been on hand when I bought home the Asda monstrosity so I hadn't had to do anything remotely technical. It may sound strange but all leads look pretty much the same to me and unless they're clearly colour coded or numbered it's all rather foreign to me. However using the very clearly written instructions booklet I managed to get the DVD player all plugged in quite easily, and in under five minutes (please note it will probably take anyone else under two minutes to do this as I do like to make it a bit of a mission).
The DVD player is really easy to use and the majority of functions can be performed using the remote control which comes with the player. It's quite light in terms of weight and small in terms of size but it does feel a little bit cheap due to the buttons being crowded onto it - I don't even know what half of the buttons do so they could have left them off! It's easy to turn on and off (using the control or on the player) as well as playing, stopping and fast forwarding films. All the standard features that you would expect to be on a DVD player are there, you can fast forward in different speed formats as well as rewind, you can pause the film and select different options.
In terms of problems that I've found well the first one is that if you stop a film (not pause it) then you can't resume it from the place you stopped it in. So even if you only stop it for half an hour you'll have to remember where you were up to and fast forward to that point which seems a little annoying. The only other downside is the tray on the actual player that comes out to put the DVD in feels a little flimsy like it could break quite easily, you'd probably need to be quite gentle with it but I've had no problems at all. My friend commented that it was a little noisy when it was loading a DVD up or searching but I can't say I'd actually noticed, some people are just fussy!
The picture and sound quality are really good, they're much better than the quality I had with my Asda disaster! I'm not really much of an expert when it comes to picture quality but there's no graininess or distortion at all - even when fast forwarding or rewinding which means it's good quality in my opinion. The sound is always clear and there's never any crackling or interference, the only time I did experience a little bit of crackling was when the cable had become loose which was really easy to rectify thank goodness! Even for a bit of a technical novice like me it's been really easy to use AND my mum has managed to load and play a DVD which is saying something!
So for the technical information that may as well be written in Chinese when it comes to me really... this DVD player supports CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R, DVD+RW, DVD-RW, DVD+R, DVD-ROM, CD and DVD-R DL which seems to me like a jolly long list of formats to support! All I know is that it plays DVDs from Blockbuster and that it also allows me to play DVDs that have been stored on a USB stick courtesy of my very technologically minded friend. There's a USB port on the DVD player and if you plug a USB stick directly into this any suitable file formats will load up on the screen and allow you to select them to watch. This is new to me as I've never known this before!
I would thoroughly recommend the Toshiba SD2010 as I've had absolutely no problems with it and I've not managed to break it yet either! As I've already mentioned it's priced at £27.99 on Amazon which I think it a really reasonable price for a DVD player. It's easy to set up and easy to use - if I can manage it then a small child would probably manage it too! I really like the fact that you can plug a USB stick into it and play films this way, it's a new thing to me but one that I've found useful. This would make an ideal Christmas present for someone who is looking for a basic yet very functional DVD player, it gets four stars from me... it looses one for the pause problem!
Thanks for reading.
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