Why You Can Trust CNET Toshiba BDX2000 Blu-ray Player review: Toshiba BDX2000 Blu-ray Player
Toshiba's BDX2000 Blu-ray player is a little light on features, but offers great picture and audio quality at an affordable price.
Two years is a long time in consumer electronics and for Blu-ray players, over that time features improve, prices lower and a lot more software is available to play on them. So for Toshiba, having had a 24-month hiatus since it closed the book on HD-DVD, the wait hasn't all been bad for the company, which has finally bitten the bullet and joined the Blu-ray fray with a machine of its own.
Toshiba BDX2000 Blu-ray Player
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
Design and features
Remove the Toshiba badge and this could have been a player from any manufacturer with its ubiquitous high gloss mirrored front panel and drop-down drawer. This is a manual affair, making the player hands-on for disc-loading, but it's hardly a chore and the player looks very neat with the drawer shut.
The specs don't extend to anything out of the ordinary for a Blu-ray player of this price and calibre — it has most (but not all) of the features that you'd expect. It'll do BD-Live with the use of an SD memory card slot (up to 8GB SDHC), as there's no USB port. On-board high-definition audio decoding caters for Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio/Essential, while the video side boasts 1080p/24fps HD scaling and SD upconversion to 1080p. The player lacks Toshiba's own XDE upscaling technology that was implemented in its branded DVD players, which tends to suggest this machine could be an OEM sourced unit for Toshiba, although the company hasn't confirmed or denied this possibility.
Owners of Toshiba Regza TVs will appreciate the fact that there's now a Toshiba BD player with Regza Link making HDMI control of both bits of kit a handy option. Other than the single v1.3 HDMI output, the remaining sockets include a LAN Ethernet port (for downloading/streaming BD-Live content), component and composite video outs as well as coaxial and optical digital audio outs. There are no multi-channel analog audio outputs, so you'll need an HDMI-equipped AV receiver to enjoy the HD sonic benefits of Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio/Essential.
Sharing a similar GUI and set-up menu system to its DVD players, the BDX2000 is a quick and easy install in most systems — the factory defaults will tend to suit the most common scenarios and we actually didn't have to make any alterations slotting it into our AV system. The remote control handset is a stock-standard affair, but it's a decent size and isn't fiddly to operate like some smaller devices.
Performance
Without worrying about picture and audio quality straight up, one of the first things to check out on any new BD player are how fast it powers up and plays discs. This still varies hugely from the ridiculously slow to on par with typical DVD player load times and thankfully the Toshiba is no slouch. We timed it at 32 seconds from the drawer closing to the opening copyright screen appearing and not long after that you're on the discs' main menu. No frustrating waiting around while the machine clicks and whirrs trying to decipher just what it is it's meant to be doing. With BD-Live content, say Transformers, it took around two minutes from start-up to the BD-Live menu, which still isn't too bad. Overall, this Toshiba's reasonably quick to get things playing — it's not the fastest around, but there are still much slower players out there.
We also breathed a similar sigh of relief when the first images appeared on screen. The BD of Transporter 3 bristled with detail and natural-looking colours. It did a fab job handling big contrast shifts — the opening fishing boat scenes looked tremendously sharp and well resolved while the later darker indoor night-time scenes when the Audi comes crashing through the living room wall were handled with classy black depth and definition. Edges, in both dark and bright images, were tight and clean and we didn't notice any nasty jaggies either with static or fast-moving pictures. The Toshiba had absolutely no trouble in dishing out the high octane action, both visually and audibly it delivered the goods with impressive style for a budget player. Coupled to a decent AV amplifier (in this case a Yamaha RX-V3800) the audio storm that source and amp cook up is ferocious — the numerous fight and car chase scenes sounded full of dynamic punch and surround sound presence.
As a DVD player, The Toshiba's upscaling made SD discs look OK, but not spectacular. Its lack of XDE showed and it's not as impressive here as Toshiba's XDE DVD players, but still conjured up respectable 1080p upscaled picture quality. DVD resolution wasn't quite as sharp or the image as detailed as we’ve seen from BD player upscaling, but Kill Bill 2 still retained much of its colourful and bright transfer and was perfectly watchable.
Where the Toshiba impressed the most was with well-produced Blu-ray software — good-looking (and sounding) titles such as Spider-Man 3, Wall-e, Transformers and Casino Royale. 1080p HD content won't disappoint even fussy viewers — where the BDX2000 leaves you wanting a bit more is mainly down to the features, or lack thereof — no wireless networking, XDE upscaling and absence of a USB port.
Conclusion
Not a bad first effort at all, Toshiba's Blu-ray debut player offers great picture and audio quality at an affordable price. A little light on some features, but this will no doubt be remedied as we see more BD hardware from Toshiba; players which are already waiting in the wings.