Toshiba SD-9200 DVD Player

Toshiba's new top of the line should be out by now, and in the near future, consumers will likely incur a price break on this one. I can recommend you snatch one up if you are looking, but don't need all the enhancements on the newest model.

This dvd player was highly recommended by one of my co-workers, so I went down to the local Magnolia Hi-Fi and auditioned it on several of the LCD screens they had. Picture was always very crisp, and looked just as good as the HDTV broadcasts I had seen.

After cycling through some of the DVD's I had brought I did not notice any of the problems that I had been noticing on my now very old Panasonic A-100, with the exception of menu skip. I have yet to see a player who didn't skip a little when doing a cycle on the menu animations and sound, but you'd think the top of the line players would provide a memory buffer that would read ahead to buffer up so that the cycle would be seamless.
Needless to say, you can not fault it when none of the competition provides such a feature.

The remote is funky. The joystick is very hard to control the title menu selections, and could use some re-design. I use a universal remote, so this didn't factor into my buying desicion.

Sound is top dollar, and it sounded even more spectacular when I got it home to my own system, which we were not able to emulate at the store.

Someone spent some time designing the menu, icons, and setup functions for this player -- they are good looking and the startup screen is easy on the eyes. Some of the functions, if you don't know what they are, will require a lookup in the manual, but that can be expected with any high end product.

The only thing that I really dislike about this player is the lack of upgradability. In this day and age, I should be able to take this thing back to the store (or to my laptop) and flash upgrade it with new functionality as new standards in dvd and cd's appear that are compatible with the laser and the reader.