Toshiba SD340 DivX Multi-region DVD Player Best Buy

Not as good as it could be - 28 Jan 2006

6 out of 6 found this review helpful.

As far as region 2 PAL DVDs go - it plays perfectly, but this unit fails to deliver on 2 key features:

DivX - playback is problematic at best. the image often becomes a mess of pixels even on the highest resolution files. NTSC files are juddery and loose sink with the audio far to often and in extremely bad ways.

Other Region Playback - I often found this unit would cease playback after more than 4 hours continuous play of any other region regardless of RCE encoding or not. NTSC was problematic and when forced PAL colour was used the image would judder like crazy, never play smoothly.

all in all, this unit suffers from not being able to successfully do what it claims 9/10 times. But if your just looking for a cheap DVD player, go ahead, its as good as any other on the market.

Toshiba SD-340E - 26 Jan 2006

4 out of 4 found this review helpful.

DVDs played fine, and I managed to get MP3 cd's working. DIVX proved very dodgy with some films either cutting out mid way, or audio going out of synch. It seems to me that Toshiba have built a very flimsy and low budget player that doesn't actually do what it says it does. They haven't released a firmware update. DO NOT buy this player.

They don't build 'em like they used to... - 24 May 2005

7 out of 9 found this review helpful.

This is the third Toshiba dvd player that I've owned and the build quality has really declined. In the past I've found Toshiba's dvd players to be excellent, the SD-120E that I had previously is still going strong. However, I think they've cut corners on this model. Shame.

Nice features and price but poor build quality etc - 27 Feb 2005

6 out of 9 found this review helpful.

i would advise anyone playing normal region 1 and 2 discs to buy the player for the price/features like the comp rgb its a bargain but thats where it ends, very cheap remote control that is not luminous (turn the lights off need to see the buttons = no chance) player is very poorly built may aswell have a saisho badge on it, playback of anything other than original region 1 and 2 dvd films =Don't bother (picture breakup sound breakup etc etc)

i'm returning it when i actually find out how too (after 30 days)its very confusing as there a no links.

all the discs play fine on my parents sony dvd player but has no rgb output :(

Bought for Divx Only - 10 Feb 2005

5 out of 6 found this review helpful.

I had been looking for a divx player for a while and decided upon this model as the Phillips one's were not always available. I have a Sony home cinema system so I did not need the DVD function (although always useful as a back up) but primarily to play my Divx collection of films which I had purchased whilst in the Balkans.

I have had very poor results with about 75% of the Divx films on CD-R's played either jumping, freezing, misalignment of "sound and vision" or just stopping altogether. When played immediately afterwards on my PC using Window media player - no problems.

Another reviewer has stated that it is disapointing that Toshiba are not planning to upgrade the firmware and I have to share his sentiments.

I'm not a techie, I don't really understand all the different formats although I am aware of what codecs are required to play these things on PC so I am very disappointed, and it's difficult trying to justify this purchase (in November 2004) to the wife! She hasn't watched even one decent playback yet!

When it does play well the picture quality is pretty good with little pixelation although you have to turn up the sound - but that could just be the recording. All you can seem to do is to pause, fastforward, rewind, stop and play the CD-R's, but I've mislaid the instruction manual (hopefully temporarily) so am unable to read up on it a bit more.

Overall...very disappointing. Perhaps I've been unlikely with my selections so far.