Why You Can Trust CNET Toshiba BDX2000 review: Toshiba BDX2000
The BDX2000 is a decent Blu-ray player at an affordable price. Support for more video codecs and YouTube playback would be welcome, but its picture quality is excellent. Also, if you buy it soon enough, you'll be able to get a year's free subscription to LoveFilm, making this player even better value for money
Not too long ago, if you'd asked us to make a list of things we thought were unlikely to happen in the field of technology, then -- right up by the top, next to Sony releasing something that uses non-proprietary standards -- would be Toshiba selling a Blu-ray player. Technology geeks will know that Toshiba once championed its own high-definition format, HD DVD, which was beaten by Blu-ray in a protracted format war. Toshiba initially indicated that it wouldn't produce a Blu-ray player, but eventually it realised that it needed to provide a player to complement its HD televisions.
Toshiba BDX2000
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
Available for around £130 or so online, the Toshiba BDX2000 is aimed at the entry-level end of the market, and has some pleasing extras that are likely to make it popular with people looking to get into HD movies. It's also quite likely that people buying a Toshiba TV will be offered this player at either a discount or for free, to encourage them to take the HD plunge. Let's find out if it's any good.
A sweetened deal
To encourage people to buy the BDX2000, Toshiba is offering a year's free subscription to LoveFilm if you shell out before the end of March 2010. The LoveFilm subscription is worth about £8 a month and allows you to have two Blu-ray or DVD movies at home at any one time, up to a limit of four each month. If you add it up, the LoveFilm subscription is worth £96, so, with the player costing just £130, it's a pretty sweet deal.
The other advantage is that you'll get to watch Blu-ray films without having to pay big bucks to build up your movie collection. If you're in the market for a Blu-ray player, and the LoveFilm offer is still running, then you should give the BDX2000 some serious thought.
We're also pleased to see that Toshiba has continued its habit of including an HDMI cable with its HD players. Not all companies do this, but they should.
Stylish and petite
The BDX2000 looks pretty decent. It uses the 'half-depth' form factor, which can make it tricky to integrate into a home-cinema system if you're planning on stacking larger items on top of it. But it's also a compact player in terms of depth -- at just 231mm deep, it isn't going to take up too much of that precious real estate underneath your TV.
To keep the player looking neat and tidy, Toshiba has opted to use a drop-down, drawbridge-style front panel. Beneath this are located all the usual buttons, along with the disc tray and an SD-card slot (more on this later).
The controls on the player itself are fairly basic: power, pause, stop, play and eject. They might prove useful if you lose the remote, though, or if you happen to be changing a disc and want to start the arduous Blu-ray loading process before you go and sit down.
Slow load times
When we come to test disc-load times, we always do so with a heavy heart. Blu-ray is, even now, a mess of a format. The Java platform it's built around is one of the most sluggish things we've ever seen, with almost all players needing more than 40 seconds to load and start playing a disc. Sadly, the BDX2000 is one of the slowest players we've tested, taking 1 minute and 22 seconds to start playing our test movie, Vantage Point.
On the plus side, the BDX2000 manages to do a superb job once the Java interactive features are loaded. Another of our test discs, Zombieland, was responsive to our navigation commands, and we were more than happy to flick around the various menus.
BD-Live: an ongoing disappointment
The BDX2000 can competently handle BD-Live functionality. Unfortunately, BD-Live is a dead loss, because no-one seems to be producing anything of any value for the online streaming services. Like all the players we've tested, the BDX2000 was slow to load the Sony Internet gateway page, and, when it was loaded, moving around the menu proved arduous in the extreme. Even when you've finally managed to navigate to what you're interested in, the chances are it won't work anyway. Is any of this Toshiba's fault? Not really, but we mention it because we want you to understand that Blu-ray is still not working as promised.
Toshiba is to blame, however, for not including enough built-in memory so that you can use the BD-Live functionality without adding an SD card. This displeases us greatly. It's a damn cheek, frankly.
Elephantiasis of the remote
It's very disappointing when a piece of AV gear arrives for review looking like it's got some sort of disease. The BDX2000's remote is one of the most hideous things we've ever seen. Most of the buttons are small, and there are far too many of them. And what possible reason is there for putting the numbers one to nine on the remote in this day and age? Does anyone select a chapter like this when Blu-ray discs offer a graphical pop-up system that's much better?
Also, why are the play and stop buttons right next to each other and exactly the same size? That's going to be a problem when you're watching a film in the dark and want to go from pause to play, and instead hit the stop button. You're going to yell with frustration, especially given the BDX2000's sluggish load times.
Super-sharp zombie destruction
We were very satisfied with the overall quality of the images produced by the BDX2000. When we plonked in Zombieland, we were greeted by an exceptionally sharp picture with tonnes of detail. We noticed features on Woody Harrelson's face that you'd have no hope of seeing on the DVD version of the film. Blood spewing from zombies also looked superb, and the colour was impressive and true to the source material.
If you opt to use the DivX-playback capability, prepare yourself to waste some time. The BDX2000 doesn't seem to really want to be involved with playback of these files. When we could persuade it to load something from an SD card, a reliable and pleasant experience generally didn't ensue. If you're buying the BDX2000 to play DivX files, we'd urge you to think again.
The BDX2000's audio quality is perfectly good via the stereo downmix the player outputs to standard TVs. When it comes to lossless audio from the Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD MA formats, then you'll be relying on your AV system to produce the audio, from the data stream. However you listen to this player's output, though, you're ears will be satisfied with what they hear.
Conclusion
The Toshiba BDX2000 is a good player at a reasonable price. Sony's likeable and similarly priced BDP-S360 is a slightly better player, but doesn't come with the LoveFilm deal that makes the BDX2000 such good value for money. We prefer the BDP-S360's performance, and it's certainly quicker, but the choice, as always, will come down to your personal preference.
Edited by Charles Kloet