Toshiba SD-3990 Progressive Scan DVD Player

by Toshiba

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 16.9 x 1.6 inches ; 9 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 6 pounds
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• Shipping Advisory: This item must be shipped separately from other items in your order. Additional shipping charges will not apply.
• ASIN: B000EBRLHK
• Item model number: SD-3990
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (147 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #47,148 in Electronics (See Top 100 in Electronics)

Product Description

Amazon.com Product Description

Nicely affordable yet packed full of powerful video and audio playback features, the Toshiba SD-3990 single-disc, progressive scan DVD player has a stylishly silver, super-slim profile that measures just 1.65 inches high. It's also compatible with a wide variety of disc and digital file formats, including DVD-R/RW, CD-R/RW, and VCD discs as well as MP3, WMA, and JPEG (Kodak Picture and FujiColor CDs) content burned to disc. It's also DivX Home Theater Certified, meaning that it's compatible with video burned to disc using both the DivX video format.

The SD-3990 performs 3:2 pulldown detection and reversal, too--a handy feature for watching progressive-scan movie programs in their native 24-frame format. To adapt 24 frames-per-second movies to 30 fps video, frames in the original movie must be duplicated; 3:2 pulldown digitally corrects this duplication by removing the redundant information to display a frame-accurate picture.

With the JPEG Viewer, you can easily display your favorite digital photos and create custom slideshows with a few simple clicks of the player's remote control. The interactive Digital Picture Zoom feature allows you to select an area of the video from a DVD and magnify it. Other DVD playback features include fast scan, slow motion, multi-angle selection, multi-subtitle selection, and parental lock.

You get vivid, realistic sound, thanks to Toshiba's 24-bit/192 kHz pulse code modulation (PCM) audio processor. PCM audio translates digital signals from your DVDs and CDs into warmer, natural sound. The DVD player offers Dolby Digital and DTS decoding, and you can connect to a multi-channel home theater surround sound system via the coaxial digital audio output. It also produces 3D virtual surround sound from two speakers. It features the following video and audio connections:

• Composite A/V: 1
• S-Video: 1
• Component Video: 1
• Digital audio: 1 coaxial

Tech Talk
DivX is a compressed digital video format (like MP3) that's based on the MPEG-4 video compression standard. It can reduce the video from a DVD (MPEG-2) to around 10 percent of its original size while still retaining good video and audio quality, enabling you to store several two-hour length movies on burned DVD media.

Component video (also called Y/Pb/Pr) features a three-jack video input, which provides separate connections for luminance (Y), blue color difference (PB) and red color difference (PR). This results in increased bandwidth for color information, resulting in a more accurate picture with clearer color reproduction and less bleeding than you would get with S-Video or composite (RCA yellow video plug) connections. You will need a separate RCA left/right audio cable for sound.

What's in the Box
Single-disc DVD player, remote control (with batteries), printed operating instructions

Product Description

SLIM PROGRESSIVE DVD PLAYER W/ DIVX

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

107 of 109 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best Region Free DVD Player which can play Divx, May 16, 2006

By 

J Smith "J smith" (San Jose, CA) - See all my reviews

First of all, let me say that this unit is very well worth the money. As "just a DVD player" I give it FIVE over FIVE points (or ten/ten if you wish).

The unit comes as Region Free DVD Player. Professionally modified to play any region out of the box. This feature makes it most versatile player as this player can play any region 1,2,3,4,5,6 PAL or NTSC on regular American TV just out of the Box It just works.

Good things:

it can play NTSC and PAL DVD, VCD. and when it plays PAL VCD, it will fit the image so that the image is not out of proper aspect ratio. You can even easily choose the left or right audio channel which is typical of VCD. Further, this DVD player can play DivX, MPG, mp3, jpg. It can play DivX with subtitles. When fast forwarding, it can go up to 30x and 100x (seems like not 100x but maybe 50x). When you step frame by frame, it works flawlessly. It's a great player for the price, considering all the media it plays (ours played DVD+RW too) and the quality of sound and picture it produces.

As a straight DVD player, this player excels. It has an absolutely brilliant progressive picture, with rich colors, and no prog-scan artifacts whatsoever. There are also a couple of nice digital touch-up controls, sharpness and brightness which can come in handy to boost dark images.

As a DIVX/Xvid player, also excellent. Highly compatible with divx 4/5 and vxid, not at all with divx 3.11 or ms mp4 v2 - according to my testing. plays ac3 audio on these files too. Interesting problem with divx subtitles. Very compatible, yet places them in the middle of the screen, which is weird, but oddly workable. The menu system for avi files is intuitive, but only captures the first 16 characters of the filename.

As a dvd-r player, it's also solid. It has played all media I've thrown at it (-r, -rw). The only problem is that it's picky about flaws. In fact, I have dozens of labeled dvd-r's which will break-up and not play past a certain point. unfortunate, but after I removed the labels (not an easy process) they played to the end.

Now for my favorite feature, the coup de grace: auto aspect-ratio. I have a 16:9 set. When I enable this feature (default), anamorphic titles will fill the screen, 4:3 titles will be in the middle (though zoomed in ever-so-slightly) and non-anamorphic letterbox titles will be zoomed in to fill the width of the 16:9. It makes this adjustment for dvd and divx content. And it gets it right 95% of the time - the other 5% you can adjust manually.

71 of 72 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Costeffective capable international dvd player, August 13, 2006

By 

Thomas Hempel (Redwood City, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This is a very nice small, cheap, functional Toshiba DVD player that has been modified to play PAL and NTSC dvds irrespective of their region encoding. It does all these things perfectly, and produces high quality output. A very useful product if you want to play Asian or European discs in the US.

47 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Multi-Region without the hassle, June 26, 2006

By 

Lost Patrol (Mount Laurel, NJ United States) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This is a solid DVD player without all the bells and whistles. I purchased it specifically for its multi-region capabilities. There are websites a plenty that tell you the secrets to unlocking the codes on almost any DVD player, however you do this at your own peril as I rendered my previous player completely useless by trying a hack. This player has been modified by a third party to achieve multi region and comes with its own guaranty. Simply, it works. Pop any DVD in from any region and it accepts and plays it.