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- Toshiba SD-220/e
- Fly Boy.'s review
| Value for Money | 7.4/10  |
|---|---|
| Overall rating | 7.3/10 |
By Fly Boy.
on 19th Aug 2002
| Value for money | 9/10 |
|---|---|
| Overall value | 9/10 |
 Fly Boy.'s recommendation | |
Price. Excellent quality video and audio. Sleek modern design. Wealth of AV outputs.
Question-marks regarding the "Firmware" version.
DVD Player: Toshiba SD220 E (multi-region chipped) playing through a JVC AV28CT1 16:9 via SCART, alongside a Toshiba V-852UK VHS VCR.
For the money, GBP135, I feel I've got an absolute bargain on this player. It's the third DVD player I've owned, and by far the best in terms of image clarity and colour stability - essential for losing yourself in a movie, rather than being reminded of the limitations of your DVD player.
In particular, the Toshiba SD220 is very good at retaining colour and contrast across large screen-areas of similar colours, whereas less able equipment will tend to produce blocky and pixilated chunks of only one or two colours.
In keeping with my own varied taste in movies, the Toshiba SD220 has had to cope with all sorts of genres - and has done it with aplomb!
Where crispness is indended - say in something modern, like X-Men - the SD220 produces smooth, sharp images that are neither harsh nor hard-edged. On an old movie, such as The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, the subtleties of the image are rendered clearly without being glaring or looking "digital".
The highest praise I can give about the picture quality is simply that you don't notice you are watching a DVD! You are aware of crystal clear, quality images, but you are never brought back to reality by poor textures, or signs that the DVD player has reached its technical limits.
I dare say that true aficionados of DVD would tell you that "product x", or "product y" produces better picture quality. That may be so, but will the increase in picture quality be proportionate to the increase in cost? I suspect the latter will probably far outweigh the former...
In terms of sound quality - unfortunately I've decided that my TV doesn't possess the best quality sound output from its on-board speakers, so my point of reference is not be the best.
Hopefully someone else, with access to better sound equipment will be able to add some comments? But in the most general terms, the sound quality is better from the DVD than from the VCR or broadcast signals - as you might expect!
My player was purchased from Richer Sounds and has proved to be faultless. I am aware that there was an issue with RS off-loading older machines with known firmware issues (they were shipping machines with version 1.3 that would not play The Matrix, or Planet of the Apes without skipping. Try pressing "zoom 606 zoom" without a disc inserted to check yours, or, if that doesn't work, search the internet for the right code). The machine I purchased early August 2002 had firmware version 1.5 and has played The Matrix and all my other R2 DVD discs without complaint. As yet, I don't own any R1 DVD discs to try, so can't comment on the multi-region capability.
However, I have tried VCD, CD, and CD-R (not high-quality or well looked-after discs either) - all of which the Toshiba has dealt with without incident.
I hope to upgrade to 5.1 Surround Sound in due course, and this unit appears to provide an excellent upgrade avenue. There are numerous outputs on the back of the machine, including an optical-out that should allow me to make up for the deficiencies of my TV's poor speakers.
Interestingly however, there is no coaxial (TV aerial) output, so if you don't have a TV that allows either SCART, or S-Video input, the SD220 isn't for you.
But then if you used coaxial, you wouldn't be getting the best from the machine anyway, and in the case of this extremely stylishly presented and very high quality unit that would be a crying shame - because there's a lot here to be enjoyed.
| Helpful | Unhelpful | Agree | Disagree |
|---|---|---|---|
| 29 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
Total Respect: +29
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