Toshiba SDP1500 8 in. Portable DVD Player

I have some boring air travel to do in the next few months and finally succumbed to the temptation to bring along my own movies -- not only for the plane but for the hotel room. While I have succeeded in playing movies on my linux laptop, I can't play all DVDs reliably, the frame rate is sometimes iffy (all in software) and the battery life of the laptop is not as long as the extended battery life of the Toshiba unit. So much for the reasons for this purchase :-) basically it is pure self-indulgence like most electronic gadgets.

I did my research and shopping online, selected a vendor
which was a compromise between low price and favourable customer ratings, and crossed my fingers.

SCREEN QUALITY

On receiving the unit I was not favourably impressed by the screen, which seemed grainy and low-res compared to the 15 inch TFT display on my Dell Inspiron laptop. The laptop display has a very pleasing "texture" and I find the Toshiba screen to be coarse-grained and over-bright by comparison.

I really don't understand why for the price (almost $800 what with shipping and so forth) one cannot get a portable DVD player with a screen of the same quality as my laptop. After all, the laptop also contains a dvd drive (plus so much more!), and the portable player screen is 1/4 the size of the laptop screen or less. The same-size image on my laptop screen from the same DVD is much nicer to look at. Yet this portable cost about a third of what my laptop cost. It seems disproportionate somehow.

The Toshiba 1500 has been rated by reviewers as the best quality screen of the current crop of portable dvd players, which I find a bit depressing -- as in "is this really the best they can do?" My hunch is that the next generation will be black-matrix tft of equivalent quality to laptop screens, and that this development will probably happen soon enough to make me wish I had not bought this unit (whose resale price will crash as soon as a new generation is on the shelves, of course). However, I am spending the hours on airplanes very soon :-)

There is one other thing to be said about this screen, and that is that the picture quality is not very tweakable. There are 5 preset settings: Normal, Movie 1, Movie 2, Dark Enhanced, and Animation. All the settings other than Normal are hypercoloured, with too much red -- resulting in a garish image. I find even the Normal setting could do with being toned down a bit, but there is no way to do this.

Viewing angle is OK side-to-side, but rather touchy in the vertical dimension. I find that small adjustments of the screen angle produce large differences in picture colour tone; and since I find the picture overcoloured and overbright to start with, I have to get fussy about the screen angle.

Although the manual claims that the screen can be dimmed to one of 4 preset brightness levels, I find in practise that using the "dimmer" button on the remote control produces only two, barely distinguishable, brightness levels -- which I would call "very bright" and "barely less bright". It's possible that this is a defect in this particular unit and I would like to hear from anyone else who has a 1500, whether this feature works for them.

To be fair I must note that the screen is fairly crisp, in the sense that there are not obtrusive motion trails, ghosts, or other problems with LCD persistence. There is of course some moire' effect from the relatively coarse grid, and the low resolution makes text (as in credits and titles) rather ratty-looking.

OTHER FEATURES

The sound quality is excellent, and (unlike a laptop with cheapo sound hardware) there is no crosstalk between the drive and the output amplifier stages. The drive itself is quiet (unlike my laptop, whose dvd drive sounds like a small lear jet). I have not discovered any useful control over sound quality (bass, treble, etc), but the surround-sound emulation output for headphones is rather good.

There are 2 headphone jacks for shared use, but alas only one volume control (seems like an oversight, since people do not always want to listen at the same levels). The excellence of the sound helps to make up for deficiencies in the picture, I find; the soundtrack is absorbing and convincing, and helps one to suspend criticism and enjoy even the small and rather garishly-hued picture.

The video signal can be displayed in several different modes, most of which are useless; for example a 4:3 movie can be displayed as a small relatively good image in the centre of the screen area, or as a larger, somewhat cropped, somewhat pixillated and blurry image using the whole screen area. I can't see why anyone would choose the latter :-)

The screen can be turned off when using the unit as a CD player. Unfortunately this unit does not play MP3 CDs, a drawback which almost made me reject it initially. It is possible to leave the player powered-up with the screen closed, which seems like both a bug and a feature :-) nice when using it as a CD player, but is there a danger that it may get left on unwittingly and flatten the battery?

One irritating thing about the unit is that one must use it to recharge the battery, yet the unit cannot be used for viewing a disc while recharging the battery. In other words it is not possible to charge up a battery while watching a movie. On the plus side, the battery charging is intelligent, with auto shutoff when charging is complete.

The LiIon battery packs are darned expensive and I am worried about their lifetime; however, the wall-wart input is a nice safe standard 12vdc and if the fancy clip-on packs die on me, I will just build an external rechargeable 12v pack using the appropriate connector. The unit draws 2a however, so any external pack will be hefty and possibly as expensive to build as the Toshiba proprietary ones; however it may last longer.

It was the premature death of battery packs, as reported by a reviewer, which turned me against the earlier SDP 1000 which is said to have a much better picture quality, though a smaller screen. A longer life battery was not available for this model, and the batteries that were available were said to die pretty quickly, as in just a year or so of use.
I am not interested in buying a new $150 battery every year.

A minor packaging issue: there is no place on the unit to store the tiny remote control. I would have liked to see a little slot or some kind of stash for the remote, which otherwise may easily get separated and lost.

After purchasing this unit I dithered for a couple of days about returning it. The vendor's 10 pct restocking fee, plus shipping and insurance, helped to discourage this idea :-) and after testing several different discs on it, I started to think it "will do". I still have the feeling that for the price, I should have got better picture quality. I did not have the opportunity to comparison-shop live, in a store, so I have not been able to compare to other higher-priced units by Sony, Panasonic, and Pioneer.

Bottom line: I am not raving with delight about this product but I think it will keep me entertained on a couple of lengthy business trips. I was unwilling to spend more than $800 for the base unit, or about $1000 total including a long-life battery option. This is what I could get for that kind of money I was willing to spend.