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... Read more

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... Read more

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.