Home > Consumer Reviews > Toshiba SD2715 5-Disc DVD Player

I researched MANY DVD players, and after much deliberation, I decided to give the Toshiba SD-2715 a try.

I had it connected to my TV and up and running in just a few mintues. The picture and audio quality were great. I had never used a "zoom" mode DVD player before, and this feature was a nice surprise that might come in handy once in a while. You can pause the movie and then zoom in to check the monogram on a shirt button, or just let the movie play while you zoom in and pan around the screen with the navigation arrows. Very cool.

The first negative thing I noticed was how SLOW this player is to identify and load a disc. It literally takes 20 seconds to figure out what kind of disc it's reading and to start playing. I tried VCD's and MP3 CD's created with my CD-RW drive on my computer, and a variety of different DVD's. So far, it has played EVERYTHING I've thrown at it... but again, the load speed is excruciatingly ssslllloooowwwww.

The only other negative is that it won't play MP3 files in random order. Who wants to listen to an MP3 CD with 250 songs on it in the SAME ORDER EVERY TIME? I'm glad it plays MP3's at all, of course, but I don't know how often I'll use this feature when there is no way to randomize the playlist.

Post purchase, I've done some research online... and so far I've only found ONE other DVD player that will actually play MP3's randomly (APEX 1500). I'm sure there are others, but I doubt that they will have all of the other positive features of this player. It's a good buy.

The Toshiba SD2715 is a 5-disc carousel-type DVD changer. As majority of new DVD players, it plays MP3, CD-R and CD-RW.

Setup

The setup process is greatly simplified by the "First Setup Menu". Not that it is rocket science otherwise :-) ...

Styling

The changer looks quite plain, although it has a lot of buttons on the front panel. The display is located above the large tray (the tray holds 5 discs in a carousel-type changer).

Connections

The player has the following connections available:

Video: a composite-, an S-video and a ColorStream component video outs. Of course, if your TV has the component-video input, it is the best way to connect the player to it. This bypasses both TV's comb filter and color decoder. The S-Video connection produces picture quality, which is almost as good.

If your TV has an S-Video input, connecting to it using a composite video would be a major mistake, as it will introduce cross-luminance artifacts and rainbow-like Moire patterns. The difference between picture quality using composite video connection and S-Video is apparent. The S-Video is much better and allows you to bypass comb filter and feed the separate chrominance and luminance information directly to your TVs color decoder.

Given a choice between S-Video connection through the cheap cable and composite connection through the most expensive one, the former will provide better picture than the latter.

The changer has a feature called "parallel video out". It allows you watch the movie on several TVs/Monitors at once by connecting to them using S-Video, component (ColorStream) and composite outs. Why would one do something like this is a mistery to me.

Audio: The changer also has coaxial and digital audio out as well as analog stereo out.

There are two ways to get real surround sound (in addition to the fake "spatializer" that creates an illusion of surround sound from two speakers):
1. Use digital audio connection and a receiver or sound system with Dolby Digital/DTS decoder.
2. Connect analog out to Dolby Pro Logic equipment

Picture and Sound

The picture and sound quality (both digital through connection and using player's DAC) are excellent. With analog connection, the sound quality depends on the player's DAC and it is very good. Since the changer will probably also be used as a CD-player, it is a good thing that it plays CDs well.

MP3, CD-R And CD-RW

The changer plays finalized CD-R and CD-RW discs (including CD-Audio and discs with MP3 files). The SD2715 is also CD-Text compatible. It also plays DVD-R and Video CD.

Features

The changer has other, virtually "standard", DVD features: programmed playback, bookmarks, parental control, CD-audio playback, camera angle select, multi-language and multi-subtitle select, Spatializer N-2-2 Virtual Surround Sound, four slow motion forward/reverse speeds.

There is 4-power zoom and still mode, 2x playback. The supplied remote control is well laid-out.

Bottom Line

The Toshiba SD2715's is an inexpensive and feature-rich DVD/CD changer. It plays CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R and MP3. At [amt] (J&R) it is a very good deal. However, check out Panasonic CV51, if you want something that looks better.

It's an excellent player with a rich feature set and excellent price. It took work to produce MP3 disks that work with this player. The CD must be ISO 9660 formatted as a data CD. Easy CD Creator can do this but you must goof around with the settings in Easy CD Creator for it to work. After messing aound with settings in Easy CD Creator, I was able to burn MP3 CD's that play correctly. Toshiba says in their "Guidelines for playback of MP3 Encoded Compact Discs" (included with the documentation with the player) to use 74 minute CD-R's. However, I used 80 munute CD-R's (Memorex) sucessfully.

I'm more of an audophile than a videophile so the CD handling was important and thus the reason for the carousel. Sound quality is quite good for this level of player with transparent highs and nicely filled out harmonics in the bass range. My quibble is with the carousel. Unless you select the repeat mode, it only plays one disk and stops. So every time I load cd's I must press repeat twice to get it to go through all the disks. Even the disk skip button moves it to the next disk but stops playing, despite what the owners manual says! And my last quibble is with the buttons on the cd player for repeat, random, disk exchange, and skip disk. Although conveniently placed, they're sooo small - about the width of a piece of lead in a wooden pencil! I'm really worried about they're longevity in daily use. Well that's it. Great sound but questionable ergonomics.

When our 5-disk CD player finally conked out, we replaced it with this slick DVD/CD player. As a DVD player it works just fine, but I doubt most people are looking to shuffle between 5 DVDs. Like us, most people are looking for it to do double duty as the home's primary CD player as well. If so, you might be disappointed. Two big problems:

(1) It is too slow in scanning CDs and responding to commands. If you just want to play a CD, you'll hate waiting around for it to be ready to accept your next instruction.

(2) The random shuffle mode is poorly designed. If you just hit the "random" button, it will play the tracks on one CD in random order and then stop. Huh? If you are able to get it into the random2 setting, it plays the tracks on the first CD randomly and then the tracks on the next CD randomly. Huh Huh? If you're like me, you want the random function to play the tracks on all CDs in the machine randomly. This DVD player can do that, but it's very hard to get the setting correctly because it involves hitting the random button three times. Now that doesn't sound difficult, but it has to register three hits. That means that you have to do it slow enough that the slow machine registers the hits, but fast enough that it doesn't think you're done -- all this without any indication from the machine of how many hits it has registered. Hint: if you turn your TV on in DVD mode, it will actually tell you which random setting you are on. That's convenient -- NOT.