Toshiba SD-1200: Reliable fifth-generation player
Written: Apr 04 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Reliable (97% of time :), nice onscreen displays, solid design, good value for people who don't NEED the upper upper echelon of DVD players
Cons: Experienced two decoding messes so far, no major features to really set it apart from most of the DVD players out there
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| jtran's Full Review: Toshiba SD-1200 DVD Player |
I bought the Toshiba SD-1200 for my parents. After owning my Samsung 709 DVD player for several months, I thought I would treat my parents to the DVD experience as well. (The SD-1200 sticker price is $250 but if you're clever with web coupons and know where to find good deals, you can usually get them for less. I bought mine from mobshop.com for a bit over $150, so good deals on these players are definitely out there.)
Since these are the two players with which I have intimate experience with, I'll occasionally compare the Toshiba SD-1200's (touted as a higher mid-range model) features with those of the Samsung 709(which is touted as a lower-end model).
The Toshiba SD-1200 has all the standard features DVD players carry nowadays, such as variable speed fastforward/rewind, zoom, A-B repeat, etc... On the flip side, however, the Toshiba also doesn't have any major feature that other players don't have. So, as far as the featureset go, it's relatively standard.
The basic core menu interface is pretty clean. It is laid out in a very intuitive fashion, with handsome little icons (the Samsung is basically just text). The font that the DVD player utilizes is smallish but very readable. Immediately the player--with its clean interface and nice design--comes across as a very solid machine. This is more than I can say about my Samsung, which has menus which hint at inferior quality.
The variable speed fastforward/rewind work just fine, although one of the features I really liked from my Samsung 709 that the Toshiba doesn't implement is 2x sound. In other words, when you're fast-forwarding a move at 2x, you can actually heard sound (also twice as fast). The Toshiba didn't have this, unfortunately. Not a critical omission, but sometimes it's cool to see actors being hyper ;)
Pressing DISPLAY on the Toshiba gives you a plethora of information about the movie and the chapter/track you're currently viewing. One piece of information I found interesting was the bitrate bar that displays how fast data is streaming through the player. Not exactly useful in the pure sense of the word, but interesting nonetheless. :) There are loads of information shown on these DISPLAY pages, so that's nice. Compare that to the Samsung, which barely displays the track/chapter numbers and runtime, and that's it. As far as I'm concerned the more information the better!
When it comes to playing movies, I have encountered different problems on the machines. On the Samsung 709, sometimes there are skips (sometimes as often as three or four times during the course of a movie), and certain movies simply won't play. (This fact has been acknowledged by Samsung.) I haven't experienced any skips so far (fingers crossed :) on my Toshiba SD-1200. Also, I haven't ran across any movies I haven't been able to play on my Toshiba SD-1200 just yet. So far, all the movies have worked fine.
There have been two instances, however, where I experienced a decoding mess (kinda like what happens when you view a large MPG video file over a slow Internet connection), where there were huge squares flickering. This happened once when viewing Life is Beautiful, and once with a generic karoake disc. I'm giving Toshiba the benefit of the doubt here, and assume that it was just a bad part of the DVDs or some dust in the system, since the problem is not repeatable. After taking the DVDs out after these problems, and inserting a different DVD, the problem went away, so the real root of the problem is beyond me. If I experience more dastardly problems, I'll be sure to clue you in on them... But the Toshiba SD-1200 is supposedly a fifth-generation DVD player.....seems to me, that DVDs still have a long way to go before establishing 100% quality dependability (in the same way that CD players took a long time before skipping was virtually eliminated...)
So all in all, I'm relatively happy with my Toshiba SD-1200. If all I'm doing is viewing a movie, and that's it, honestly there's not much difference between that and the Samsung 709. The picture quality is supposedly higher using the Toshiba, but I haven't been able to verify that for myself. (Also, picture quality is also dependent on the cables and the TV, from what I hear, so these things are hard to measure absolutely.) However, in the minor touches--such as the menu system, the onscreen displays, and relatively stability--the Toshiba does win out.
Considering the price I paid for it, and the fact that I haven't really encountered a better DVD player (they may be out there, but I don't have $900 to find out :), I'd have to say that the Toshiba should fit the bill for most home theater systems. Unless I run into major snags with this machine in the future, for now, I'm giving it a definite RECOMMEND.
Good luck to everybody on their DVD players--and may your movies always enterain!!
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
jtran
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Member: Jim Tran
Location: Montclair, CA
Reviews written: 5
Trusted by: 1 member
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