Toshiba XD-E500 Upconverting 1080p Extended Detail DVD Player

Comment: To those people who have had the "pixelization" problem: go get a DVD player cleaner! It solves the problem in 10 minutes!

This has been a great upconverting DVD player for my family, and worked much better than another panasonic model I had that did a pretty sorry job upconverting my DVDs. I have since purchased a higher-end samsung blu-ray player only to find that this Toshiba XDE500 unit plays my DVDs much better than the two blu-ray players I have tried (both of which said they would "enhance" my DVDs). This unit has been very reliable for me for over a year until my wife wasn't looking and tried to cram two DVDs into it and got the lens dirty. After looking around and trying to diagnose the problem I got a lens cleaner based on some advice on this review forum and viola! problem solved.

Remember this: The price is right. Don't expect blu-ray levels of video quality, but it upconverts DVDs well. If you want blu-ray, go that route then. Otherwise, this is a good option B.

Comment: What a mistake. I bought this thing because of the so-called "Blu-ray" like quality. Nope. A week after I had it, it started acting up. I kept having to uplug it and hold the power button in. Then for some reason the carriage for the DVD wouldn't open one night, for no apparent reason.

JUNK, JUNK, JUNK. Toshiba, you should be ashamed of this. I opened up back and looked at the inside of it, nothing but plastic and a few modules that were definitely on the lower end of quality. I have a toshiba TV, I hope I don't have issues with that too.

Comment: Everything works well on this on this player once it recognizes the DVD. I have to recycle open/close a few times to get past "no disk". Maybe the lens has a "splinter" in it. Resume after pause is OK but not after a stop or shutdown. My other players will remember the last play of several movies. Picture quality is very good.

I play on buying a decent BD player and giving away this unit.

Comment: I was very happy with this DVD Player... the image was great and it was easy to use. Ten months after I bought it though, the unit died. I got the 'green screen of death' a problem that's apparently common to this player. Toshiba's phone tech support is HORRIBLE... many layers of menus with very poor voice recognition software, and when I finally got to a rep, he told me that if I paid to ship my old unit back, they'd ship me a refurbished unit for a cost of nearly TWICE what Amazon is asking for a brand new one. Yeah, right. I got ripped off... don't let it happen to you. Avoid this like the plague!

Comment: I'm an every-day TV watcher - I don't have a huge screen TV, just a 32" tube TV. So for me, I need a DVD player that simply produces a good picture, and if it improves on our previous DVD player, then I'm happy. And this DVD player indeed did producer a better picture with deeper blacks, richer colors and sharper overall picture than the several-years old Sony DVP-NS77H/B that seemed to be fading with time, for whatever reason. It's operation is simple and easy, and the design of the Toshiba is slightly preferable to me (aside from the shining XDE on the front, it's just a black slab.) I have yet to set it up for region-free play, but everything I read says it is very easy to do (see other reviews here.)