Toshiba SD-4900 Progressive Scan DVD Player
Very Disappointed
I have always loved Toshiba electronics, so when I saw this DVD player I did not hesitate to buy it.  It is not the quality I normally get when I buy Toshiba.  Here are the reasons I returned it a 30 days later.<br />I quite often will hit a button to display how much time is left in the DVD I'm watching.  This feature is not even an option with this player.  I could only display the elapsed time.  I thought maybe I just didn't understand how to do it.  I looked all through the book.  The feature just isn't there.<br />I quite often hit pause and with my previous Sony DVD player and could even hit stop then hours later hit play and resume watching where I left off.  This player will do that but only for so long.  After a while it goes back to taking you to the very beginning of the DVD even if I never hit stop or the power button.<br />If you can enter a chapter number to go straight to, then you must have to hit some other button first.  When I pressed the number buttons once a DVD was playing, it did nothing.<br />Which brings me to the layout of the buttons on the remote.  Not practical at all.  Maybe I just wasn't used to it, but the one button I use the most is &quot;Pause&quot;.  Pause as in, I have to answer the door; or the phone is ringing; or I'm thirsty.  Why is button so small and surrounded by other small buttons so close?  Every time I looked for a button, I had to search and never could get used to the layout.<br />When you are in front of the player, all the buttons look a like.  Each one is a little dot and the text above it is very small.  The contrast between the letters and the background was worse than what I see in these photos.  I have better than 20 / 20 vision and had trouble finding the button I wanted when the lights were dim.<br />I'm not sure what this next observation means, but found it interesting.  The Sony DVD player I accidentally cooked with a very powerful receiver, and the Sony DVD player that replaced this Toshiba model would show widescreen movies centered perfectly in the center of the TV screen.<br />However, the two main TVs I watch that are the monitors for this receiver are both Toshibas - A 57&quot; 16:9 widescreen and a 37&quot; tube.  This player would show the movie with more of the black bar on the bottom than the top.  When the picture was large enough on my widescreen to not have the black bars, it did seem like the top was too cut off.  I suspect this is the cause of the DVD player, but in fairness to Toshiba, the receiver is a Sony.  I did not try the DVD player directly connected to the TV, but I see no reason why a receiver would alter the signal it receives and amplifies.