Toshiba BDX2000 review

The BDX2000 is Toshiba’s first foray into the Blu-ray market after the failure of its HD DVD standard. On looks alone, the player is a big success. The small deck (it’s the same size as a DVD player) looks fantastic thanks to the flap that hides the disc tray and playback buttons. A window means that you can still see the display and use the remote with the flap up.

There’s plenty to like at the back, too, with all of the outputs you’d expect to find on a decent Blu-ray player including HDMI and component video outputs for HD. HDMI is your best bet, as the BDX2000 supports all of the latest HDMI video technologies including Deep Color and x.v.Color. This output is also the only way to get HD sound, including DTS-HD Master Audio and Dolby TrueHD. If you’ve got an older amp that doesn’t have an HDMI input, you can use the player’s optical or coaxial S/PDIF outputs, although Blu-ray audio will have to be downsampled to DVD quality.

A key point about Blu-ray players is performance, with the early generation taking an age to start up. Fortunately, the BDX2000 is pretty quick. The player turned on within 20 seconds and could play a DVD within an extra 20 seconds or a Blu-ray within 35 seconds.

We found that the player was a little sluggish to respond to the remote. In particular, fast-forwarding or rewinding caused the video to pause for a fraction of a second first, but it’s not enough to be annoying.

Video quality was excellent and we noticed no flaws or artefacts from Blu-ray discs. DVD content is upscaled, although Toshiba hasn’t used its XDE engine as on its upscaling DVD players. Even so, the quality was pretty good. The player did a good job of de-interlacing our Spider-man 2 DVD and diagonal lines only looked slightly jagged on close inspection. The player did nothing to remove compression artefacts around on-screen text by default, although you’re unlikely to pay too much attention to these at comfortable viewing distances. Turning up the Noise Reduction can help solve this problem, although you’ll need to adjust the settings manually to make sure that you don’t lose image quality by softening the picture too much.

BD Live content is supported over the Ethernet port, but the BDX2000 doesn’t have any storage built-in to use it. Toshiba recommends that a 1GB SD card be installed for this feature. Fortunately, the SDHC slot is located on the front of the player. When inserted, a card doesn’t block the flap, so you can easily leave one plugged in permanently.

Videos, music and pictures can be played back from an SD card on the player, but it’s not very pretty to use. It’s also a little disappointing that there’s no USB port for connecting a flash drive or external hard disk. For audio, only MP3 and WMA files are supported, and you can’t browse music by ID3 tag, choosing to play tracks by artist, album or title. Instead, you can only browse the SD card’s file structure; sadly, long file names aren’t supported, which can make finding a track difficult. The filename restriction is present when playing videos and pictures, too.

Image support is limited to JPEG files. The player is quick to display photos and will even show them in order in a slideshow. It’s annoying that you can’t play a music track and view your images at the same time. Video support is limited to DivX and AVCHD files from camcorders.

These limitations mean that the SD card slot is more for occasional media playback rather than letting the BDX2000 take over as a generic media player.