Toshiba SD-4990 Upconverting Progressive Scan DVD Player
Good for the price
I've had my Toshiba SD-4990 HDMI DVD PLAYER for a week.  I bought it for about $90 and was hoping to watch DivX movies as well as enjoy the benefits of the upsampling to HD formats on regular DVDs.  I have this DVD player hooked up to a 42\\" Sony LCD projection tv (KDF-E42A10)using an HDMI cable.  ($25 at newegg for the cable)   <br /> <br />After reading the manual I was a bit dissapointed.  It clearly spells out what format will work for CDs with DivX movies.  It failed to mention any options for DivX on DVDs, just 650 Meg CDs.  But I gave it a try, and had no problem watching DivX movies off of DVD-R disks (8x media burned at 4x).  I tried a 700 meg CD, too, with no problems. I've tried about a dozen files (DivX, Xvid, and random unknown .avi encoded files) and they all worked.   <br /> <br />I was also able to view subtitles for a XviD movie where the subtitles were in a seperate .SRT text file. That was a welcome surprise.  The DVD had several movie files and several .SRT files.  Each time I play a movie from that DVD-R, an on-screen menu asks me to pick which .SRT file to use (with 'none' being an option).    It would be nice if the player was smart enough to figure out which subtitle file to use (based on the file names), but it's easy enough to work with the menu system it uses.     <br /> <br />The quality for these .avi files was very surprising.  I couldn't be happier with the image quality in this playback mode.   <br /> <br />On the down side, I really can't see a difference between 480p, 720p and 1080i with the HDMI cable on a regular DVD.  So far I've just tried two movies (Return of the King and Spirited Away) and neither of them showed much of an improvement compared to composite video cables.  Maybe my TV does a good job of interpolating those pixels by itself?  I don't know.  I'm not saying the DVD player isn't doing anything, but after an hour or so playing with it, I can't really see a difference.   <br /> <br />The high res HD JPG funtion is kind of neat.  I threw a few jpgs onto a disc and they played as advertised.  You can set the duration for which each image will be displayed.  You can also toggle on/off the high res mode.  It seems like in normal mode, the image is resized to fit on the screen.  In HD mode, it is left at its native resolution. So if you have a big (eg 2000 x 3000) jpg, you'll only see part of it on the screen since that's bigger than what a 1080i display can show.  I've just played with this a little, so maybe I'm missing something...   <br /> <br />I don't have an external sound system, but the sound is fine through the built-in speakers on my tv.   <br /> <br />While watching DivX movies, I experienced a couple of pauses as other comments here have mentioned.  In one case it stopped playback entirely and I had to fast forward back to that part of the movie to continue.  That could have been a problem with the file, though.  After watching just two regular DVDs I haven't had any problems with their playback.   <br /> <br />In conclusion, this DVD player has pretty much met my expectations.  The image quality is great, but I was hoping for a more noticable difference in playback with the upsampling of DVDs.  But the DivX playback is better than I had hoped for.  I'm not sure how much I'll use the JPG playback feature, but it might be fun for showing off baby pictures when friends are over.  (and you thought the commercials at the theater were bad!)  For the price, I'm very satisfied.