Toshiba SD-P1850 Portable DVD Player with 8-Inch Widescreen LCD

by Toshiba

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 17.5 x 4 x 10 inches ; 5 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 6 pounds
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B000ELC148
• Item model number: SD-P1850
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (45 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #50,567 in Electronics (See Top 100 in Electronics)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: March 28, 2005

Product Description

Amazon.com Product Description

Take your favorite entertainment on the road with you and keep your kids entertained during long car trips with the slim-profile Toshiba SD-P1850 portable DVD player with 8-inch LCD screen with 180-degree flip and swivel functionality. Its active matrix TFT LCD has a 480 x 234-pixel resolution with a 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio for watching movies in the format they were made to be watched, built-in stereo speakers, and a single headphone jack. You can view movies on an external TV set via either the AV or S-Video output connections. It also provides Dolby Digital surround sound decoding via the digital coaxial audio output connection.

It includes dual headphone jacks so you can share your movie experience with a partner, a rechargable battery with up to 4 hours of battery life, and a cigarette lighter adapter for powering the player while in the car. In addition to DVD movie and CD audio discs, it's also compatible with DVD-R, CD-R/RW and VCD discs. You can play discs burned with MP3 and WMA digital audio files, and it's also DivX Home Theater Certified--meaning that it's compatible with video burned to disc using both the DivX video format. You can also view photo slideshows from Kodak Picture CDs with JPEG images. The integrated multi-format memory card slot is compatible with Secure Digital (SD), MultiMedia (MMC), Memory Stic, and XD Picture Card formats, enabling you to view JPEG images and unencrypted MP3/WMA audio.

With the Digital Picture Zoom interactive feature, you can select an area of the picture you want to zoom in on and magnify it. It can also be used to expand letterbox-only films to increase the viewable area on-screen. Other convenience features include slow motion (1/8, 1/4, 1/2), parental locks, and 3D virtual surround sound. It includes both input and output composite AV jacks.

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.

What's in the Box
Portable DVD player, remote control (with battery), car power adapter, AC adapter, AV cable, rechargable battery, printed operating instructions

Product Description

8" PORTABLE DVD PLAYER

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

366 of 370 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Portable DVD Player for the money, March 10, 2006

By 

Mediahound (SF Bay Area, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 50 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Toshiba SD-P1850 Portable DVD Player with 8-Inch Widescreen LCD (Electronics)

I can recommend this DVD player after doing a lot of research and also trying out a few other models. My opinion is that the 3 best brands of portable DVD players are Toshiba, Phillips and Sony.

But I eliminated Sony because Sony is more expensive and does not include a fast forward button built in. In order to fast forward on the Sony models, you have to use the remote control which is sort of a dumb design.

While Phillips brand has better LCD video quality than Toshiba, and seems better built, the Toshiba has much more functionality. I chose Toshiba because:

-it has AV in (as well as out) so you can plug in a digital camera to display your photos or a video game system to play games. Phillips does not.

-the battery connects to the back and still allows you to set the player down flat on a table. The Phillips, oddly, makes the player rest at an angle when you attach the battery.

-Battery life. Toshiba is rated 4 hours, Phillips is rated 2.5 hours.

-Resume function: if you stop a movie, you can resume where you left off. The Phillips lacks this basic and useful function.

The Toshiba seems solidly designed and came very well packaged. It can read homemade DVD-Rs too, which not all players can do (Phillips can). For the 8" size of the screen, it seems nice and compact unlike the equivalent Phillips, which seems a lot bulkier.

I would recommend this player, it seems to have all the features I want, yet is compact and seems sturdy.

111 of 112 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great picture, many features, & solidly built, June 9, 2006

By 

Mark J. Pearson "pastor & book lover" (Portland, Maine) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Toshiba SD-P1850 Portable DVD Player with 8-Inch Widescreen LCD (Electronics)

I'm really impressed by the combination of quality of design and construction of this player. I'm no expert, but have been looking for a few weeks rather intensively, and this is by far my favorite among the $150 - $200 players. The screen is bright and sharp--a much more watchable picture than some 10" screens I looked at. Two headphone jacks and the ability to play DVD-r's were essential to me, and this unit delivers without a hitch. It's got plenty of volume (I prefer to listen through headphones), and all the necessary controls are on the unit itself as well as on the small but not cramped remote. It also plays divX discs well.

I had been looking at some of the units around $100 and after handling this one, couldn't justify putting any money toward those universally cheaply constructed units.

It is more compact than many of the 7" units I looked at, which I like. It didn't seem overly warm underneath when playing a full-length movie (an important consideration when holding it on your lap!). But I bought it for the clarity of the screen and the solid feel. A great value, and an all around winner!

48 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, very versatile player (Toshiba SD-P1850SN)!, January 21, 2007

By 

Mark Baum (Freeport, PA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Toshiba SD-P1850 Portable DVD Player with 8-Inch Widescreen LCD (Electronics)

Out of the various gear I use to compose and edit video I especially love this Toshiba SD-P1850 player. In fact, merely calling it a "DVD player" doesn't do this product justice.

This is a great geek device. It's simple enough for people who just want to merely watch DVDs. For people like me who LOVE details this player is as geeky as it can get. For example, if you want to talk about sheek geekiness how many players do you know of that that can display ALL stats on the current title you're viewing (video/audio codecs, bandwidth information, etc.) in realtime? For DVD reviewers who want to present such stats in their reviews such information lends this player much cred for those seeking the ultimate reference-quality movie experience.

What I've noticed as of late that more DVD players are shipping with flash memory card slots. Intrigued and, since I was looking for a portable DVD player anyhow, this is the feature that sold me. I was curious as to how this technology would help me in my design work. Now I can say with complete satisfaction that for quick & dirty video presentations on the road or testing a cut of a video presentation before committing it to a full CD-R/VCD or DVD-R/DVD burn it is a great alpha/beta-testing tool.

Where this unit shines is within its DivX video codec capability (MPEG4). While I don't use DivX to encode my short films I do use its free open-source counterpart, XviD. For XviD afficionados I offer solid first-person anecdotal evidence: This player DOES play XviD-encoded video beautifully. So for those who had any doubts or still hesitating on whether to buy any DivX-compatible player yet didn't feel like an investment in a player just to realize in the end that it didn't work, here's your confirmation: Assemble your footage, encode it with XviD (I also use the Lame open-source audio codec to encode the audio to MP3 format) and play away. The only limitations are what you impose during the encoding process (more bandwidth means higher-quality video, of course) and by the speed of the memory card (or disc speed, depnding upon where you have your .AVI files). Since DivX/XviD is optimized for low-bandwidth the results are beautiful as opposed to the more ancient codecs out there (Indeo or Quicktime, anyone?). And Lame-encoded MP3 is definitely the way to go for a killer audio presentation.

Anyhow, back to the review of the player itself. I'm sure that a nice discussion of XviD and Lame can ensue as people discuss off of my pithy review. ;->

The dual headphone jacks are a nice feature if you want to view footage with a friend in relative privacy without the need of a splitter. There are also ports for A/V to output this player's data to a full-sized stereo system and monitor (television, HDTV, etc.) plus a PCM/bitstream jack for digital audio output (for external DTS decoders). When the external output is in use the LCD screen's backlight turns off. If you want you can close the LCD screen while it's still playing, turning this unit into a very sleek and space-saving DVD player. For other video work this player can also double as a simple portable monitor for other video devices.

The LCD screen quality is quite good. In fact I was watching Martin Scorsese's "Casino" DVD on it and found the video quality to be superb. In fact one may detect some grain in certain DVD footage because the screen is that sharp (Sidney Lumet's/Paddy Chayefsky's "Network" is an example of such a film which, due to its age, does show its grain). Also it appears that the screen is interlaced like that of a television. While I'll have to dig within my DVD collection to see if I have some progressive scan titles to verify that it's not just the hardware but the specific DVD video itself, it's still an impressive small screen. I would like to have the option of adjusting the brightness of its backlight, though.

The only problem that I have with the player is that on the handful of 4:3 aspect ratio titles I own or of video shot and presented in that format is that the player's LCD screen doesn't adjust accordingly (for example, non-anamorphic 16:9 titles which were simply 16:9 features letterboxed into 4:3 format). So, the 4:3 fills the 16:9 screen completely and destroying the aspect ratio in the process. It would be nice if the unit had a feature to matte the sides of the screen so that the original aspect ratio would be preserved (just like in widescreen features). The model of my DVD player was manufactured in September 2006 and I recall that HDTV monitors did have that feature at the time, so this is a "bug" as it were within a great technological presentation.

All in all, this is turning out to be one of my favorite toys. Err, I meant to say "TOOLS"! ;-> With this product along with my notebook computer and my Nikon digital camera (it can take very good video clips too) I have my own guerilla video editing platform that can fit in a couple of easily-carried bags (the camera and player total less than $400 in price and take up very little space). As a standalone player with killer battery life that can play most video tossed at it I cannot recommend this product enough. This is a killer toy...err, TOOL for geeks.

Oh, and keep an eye out for ANY player with BOTH memory card slots AND DivX capability. If a player doesn't have those two features then it's obsolete.