Customer Reviews

Toshiba SD6100 1080p Upconverting DVD Player

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(20)

 

 

I'm impressed with the picture quality coming out of the 6100. I only expected it to be slightly better than regular dvd but sometimes watching a movie I can almost forget that it's not a Blue-ray. I give it a 9/10 for picture quality and I am pleasantly surprised.

As for the "Regza-Link" I don't know. You are supposed to be able to control the DVD player with the TV remote if you have a Toshiba Regza television which I do but I still had to program the code for the DVD player in to the TV remote, which I would have had to do anyway. It turns the TV off when you turn off the DVD like a blue-ray but doesn't turn on the tv when powered on.

These things aren't as important to me as the picture quality and for that I give it a 9. Only way it could be better is if it were a Blue-ray.
I'm running the 6100 with an HDMI cable to a Toshiba 47" Regza.

*Edit 9/7/08*
Still happier than ever with the 6100 and am still considering whether I really need a blu-ray player. The new DVD's that are being released are so much clearer than those even released a few years ago and really look fantastic upscaled to 1080p. Read an article that Toshiba's answer to Sony after losing the format war between Toshiba's HDDVD and Sony's Blu-ray is to offer 1080p upscaling so good it's hard to distinguish from blu-ray. After using this DVD player I believe it and look forward to seeing what Toshiba has in store for the future.

First, it is very light and small in size, so you don't really need a lot of space for it. Mine sits in front of my 42 inch lcd tv. It does not have a clock but unless it's a dvd burner, you don't really need one. Second, it does not play homemade dvds, I get the message"bad disk" while I have no problem playing them on two of my other dvd players (Panasonic). I gave my daughter a Toshiba dvd player and she too, has the same problem so it must be the Toshiba technology. But the price was right for a HD player, about $52 so I'm not complaining. I do like Toshiba products so I tend to stick with the brand.

This upconverting DVD player's picture is fantastic, but the options are limited. It's front display is sophomoric, and buttons are few. The REGZA connections however, make up for it's simple controls. When you insert a disk, the TV automatically changes to DVD intputs, nice. Picture is amazing, and clear. It is, however, a little louder in operation than I thought. I read the reviews about it making a little noise, but motors sound louder than my 10 year older player sitting next to it. Oh well, just turn the volume.

Had this machine for four months (30 days past the warranty deadline) when the tray started acting up - it doesn't stay out, giving you a bare moment to remove or add a DVD before retracting again. A month or so later it started giving errors and ceased playback of home-burned movies altogether.
This was my first experience with Toshiba - and my last.

My product lasted less than 60 days. When it went bad, I called the service number who told me to take it to a service center. I did that and was told I needed to send it in to Toshiba directly. After all the run around, it was past my 90 days so I was out of luck. At least they were kind enough to offer a replacement... but at a cost more than the price I paid originally! Gee thanks!

When my beloved Toshiba DVD player finally died after a very long life about a month ago, I quickly purchased one of these (Toshiba SD6100 Upconverting DVD player) without a second thought. I have been a Toshiba brand loyalist for a long time, owning several pieces from their product line, but after my experience with this "new" unit over the last month, I am unfortunately going to be looking into other manufacturers for home technology.

For nearly six years, I was the happy owner of one of the best players on the market at the time & this model's early predecessor - the SD2800. If you owned one, you'll no doubt agree with me that it was phenomenal from the standpoint that it just flat-out worked, all the time! No exceptions! Over the course of its life, it played everything I threw at it -- thousands of movies, from home-made discs, to Netflix / Blockbuster DVDs and even music & picture CDs. It never broke, never stopped playing, never had issues, and was simply as reliable and tenacious as any piece of home technology I've ever owned.

It boggles my mind, then, but something must have happened internally at Toshiba in the years since they stopped making the 2800 and moved onto this 6100 model. In a word, the 6100 is junk. I would humbly suggest that whomever runs R&D for Toshiba needs to drag out their archived project file for the 2800 and give it a thorough re-reading.

But to the review -- in contrast to my previous model, the 6100 will play only a fraction of what I put in it. Windows Media Center-created DVDs won't play with any kind of reliability, no matter the disc or the content, Netflix DVDs are hit-or-miss, and brand-new DVDs that I've purchased will play only if they are squeaky clean and virtually unused. Upconverting DVDs that will play to 1080 resolution is merely adequate, at best. Older or copied stuff? Forget about it.

The front panel has been "updated" too -- and in my opinion, not for the better. Where the front LCD window was helpful and accurate, before, with its clear, blue-tinted text, this model instead provides extremely limited feedback text in an ugly beige / yellow color that's actually harder to read -- and given the machine's sparseness in what it tells you, a lot harder to interpret. The number of functions you can perform without the remote by just using the front panel is severly limited too. Before, if I happened to misplace the remote, it wasn't a big deal; I could do nearly everything the remote was capable of by using controls on the machine's front panel. On this model, no such luck. If you happen to have battery problems or lose the remote with this one, you're toast! Your options are basically limited to On/Off, Open and Play. Don't even think about navigating menus without the remote.

Other changes that seem odd and appear indicative of a technological step backward include much cheaper case/model construction & materials, a re-organized remote that makes less sense than it did before, a disc tray that takes so long to respond to the "Open" command that you can almost literally go pour yourself a cup of coffee before the tray emerges, a dramatic slow-down in disc read-time, removal of the machine's ability to remember what place your DVD was at when you turned off the player last (yes, now you have to fast-forward from the beginning back to the point you were watching, every time), and finally an irritating new menu screen that is more difficult to navigate.

Without question, I was astonished to buy the "latest and greatest" from Toshiba and find that it was, in my opinion, only greatly inferior to a model six years its senior. I'm rating this with 2 stars because, as I said above, it will play Netflix and commercial DVDs, so long as they are relatively recent movies and are in absolute perfect condition. But in all honesty, I wouldn't recommend this model to anyone -- mine will be going back in the box and on to Craig's List or eBay, while I go figure out which company hired the people that worked for Toshiba six years ago.

I had this DVD player for three weeks before it started freeze framing and sending error messages. My friend has had the same model DVD player for three months and his is starting to give error messages too. Don't waste your time or money. The customer service isn't much help either. I'm switching to another brand.

Great player for the low price. Too bad this player does not have a memory for last played locations on discs.
I wish it was able to output DD 5.1 via HDMI. I had to use the coax audio to do this. No biggie. I was just wanting to eliminate cables. Picture quality is good.

The Toshiba SD-6100 turned my perceptions of up-conversion upside down. My first experience with an upconverting DVD player was poor - the early generation HDMI Denon I bought on clearance gave no quality improvement over my old JVC in component 480p. But on this unit picture quality at 1080i and 1080p is fantastic. The player delivers rich colors due to the high 14-Bit video D/A conversion. It also does an amazing job de-blocking the DVD video MPEG artifacts and truly "up-converting" the lower resolution quality of DVD movies to a much better quality. This player made me a believer. I actually enjoy watching DVDs again on my 37" LCD widescreen TV. A quick note for widescreen TV users - as soon as you get the DVD player online be sure to go into the setup and change the screen ratio setting from 4:3 to 16:9, otherwise your DVD videos may not stretch correctly to fit your screen. If the small remote leaves you wanting pick up a universal remote such as the Sony RM-VL600.

worked fine for a few months and then just craped out. the tray seemed to be the main problem, but it wasn't the only one.