Home > Consumer Reviews > Toshiba SD2805 5-Disc Carousel DVD and CD Player

My wife and I live in the home entertainment Stone Age, and it was only this week that we finally fired up our first DVD player - the Toshiba SD-2805.

We purchased this device for a pittance on the website that shall remain anonymous, except that it's also a river.(Huh? Mississippi? Danube? Perhaps Mekong?) Anyway, the player meets all expectations.

I'm mechanically adept as a brick. I mean, I need coaching on how to hammer a nail. But the SD-2805 was amazingly simple to get up and running. The standard audio and video connections that came in the box were perfect for our older 27-inch TV. I barely needed the more than adequate owner's manual. (Now, when we get that $6K, 42-inch, HDTV flat screen with the Blast-Out-the-Neighbors sound system, we'll need more cables. But that's then, and this is now.) And when I started up the only DVD in my possession, CAPTAIN CORELLI'S MANDOLIN, Penélope Cruz was more of a Babe than I remembered (due to the excellent quality of the picture). I can even zoom in to ogle!

The TOSHIBA SD-2805 will do for us everything we expect of a DVD player at this time. Sure, it'll ostensibly play audio CDs, but I really don't care since I generally only listen to those on my auto's Bose system, and it would be awkward to connect the car speakers into the SD-2805 anyway. (Boy, I'd need miles and miles of wire just for the daily trip to work!) And I've seen the criticism that the buttons on the remote are too small. While that observation is perhaps legit, just hire a savvy 5-year old to punch them for you while you occupy your hands with the beer and chips.

For the price, this new toy represents excellent value.

Unfortunately, I have to reiterate what another reviewer's experience was. I placed a disk in, it played it for an hour or so and it seemed to be working well. Suddenly, the picture froze and that was it. It would neither play that disk again nor any other. I will call Toshiba and ask for an explanation and, armed with that information, I will decide whether I will seek a refund and shop for a different player or whether I will request a replacement to give this dvd player another try.

Overall good buy.

Good MP3 playback - manual says that MP3 on CD-R with 700MB is not supported but in actual practice it does work!

Works beautifully with DVD/regular audio/CD-R regular audio/CD-R MP3/VCD 2.0 format. Have not yet tried all the menu options but with VCD the search using direct time is not supported which makes VCD watching in time gaps little annoying. The fast forward also is limited to 8X for VCDs. For DVDs the fast forward is 100X (very good!)

The picture/sound quality is good. The remote is good and works.

First off, this player is a good deal at this price. The DVD player ranks very high in audio/video quality and is compatible with many types of disc formats. But it lacks several simple features that would have made it great. There is no direct access to each disc on the remote. So if you want to go from disc 1 to disc 5, you have to press "disc skip" on the remote four times. This wouldn't be bad, but as you skip from disc to disc, the player has to read each disc before you can skip to the next one.

The remote is too small. It has a good layout that is easy to use, but the buttons are too close together. The on-screen displays are also disappointing. I prefer text-based displays instead of the icon-based displays the the SD-2805 uses. These displays are sometimes hard to read. My biggest problem with the on-screen display is that it doesn't show you the total time or time remaining of the DVD your are watching. It only displays the elapsed time, so you don't know if there is 2 minutes or 45 minutes left in the program. I find this very annoying escpecially when watching the extras on dvds.

I repeat, the DVD picture and sound is fantastic, and so is the audio on CDs. However, the one CD-R I tried with MP3 files on it doesn't play at all. The machine finds all the tracks, but refuses to play almost all of them: most it just pauses on for two seconds then skips to the next; some it will "play", but all you hear is a bunch of dangerous sounding pops and beeps. For some random reason, it did successfully play one of the David Gray songs, and it sounded great, but no others. Now, this CD-R was in CDFS format, which is an extension to ISO9660, with long filename support, so perhaps that is the problem? I know the manual says only ISO9660 with 8.3 names is supported...I'll have to continue to experiment.

Also, MP3 track navigation blows bigtime: if you have a file tree of nested directories, you only ever see the MP3 file names, not the directories.

A more general problem I noticed was the loud clicking the machine makes when stopping or starting play of any format media: it does not sound too healthy.

So, I'm somewhat disappointed, considering this was top rated by Consumer Reports, and I wish amazon gave free shipping on this item, but still, for $$$, it's not too bad, as long as you don't mind poor MP3 compatibility.