Astounding quailty and value from Toshiba, Kudos to them!!!

Remote,--no seprate fast forward button. Small inconvence....

This unit was bought from Consumer Direct on the web for- 259.00 and will hold this price for one week after this post. For those interested! Excellent company offering a large array of audio vidio equipment and killer customer service!
Ok this toshiba, well all i can say is how do they do it! This is a fourth generation unit 11/99 manufactured date. All problems seem to have been addressed by toshiba. I have seen not even a glitch when playing dual layer material. Smoothe as glass even at layer change! Zoom feature is the clearest ive seen in lower end DVD players. Very little pixelation. Some may find it a nice feature for filling TV on 16.9 DVDs ,, thus avoiding black bars on top and bottem. Some feel trays seem weak and slow? I find them to be much better than most players in its price range. Picture quailty and audio are excellent, and HCCD is fantastic. Black level is sharp and clean and defenitly a must for low light viewing.I dont know how many of you have in home demoed other brands of players, but i have many! All in the 500.00 and under area and this Toshiba simply comes in near or dare i say top! It carries many features that you wont find on most lower end units and pulls it off at a price that simply amazing! In short make sure your getting a fourth generation player and all problems most have delt with should be a thing of the past! Im very pleased with my unit. ( The only negitive thing i have to say is though toshiba has brought us a very good dollar value in the 3109 , there customer service is ther weak link as im sure many of you have found.. ) Unit runs cool and front panel display is fully informative. Display is also dimmable another nice feature. Remote has been given alot guff and aside from what i wrote above it seems well thought out good balance and plenty of power to get across the room even under a blanket. Bit rate meter is nice for those who enjoy an extra gizmo. Audio line out though adaquit may be considered buy some a bit low. Basicly for the money, what you get is an awful lot. So check one out you wont be dissapointed!!!

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Samsung-909
Konka-1800 and many others...

Picture, Sound, Dual Tray, User Friendly.

Remote!!!

The sound and picture is good. I noticed that it freezes on some DVD's and when i checked those DVD's (thinking they were scratched) I played them on other DVD machines and it just played on, It corrects errors...This Toshiba does not.
The remote is not designed to be a total couch potato remote...You still have to get up to eject. There is no Fast forward nor fast reverse buttons. you have to press skip and keep your fingers on it at all times.
This is a very user friendly machine. I just wished that it would play more DVD movies more smoothly and corrects errors.

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Pioneer DV-C302D, Kenwood, Sony, Toshiba, Fisher, Panasonic, JVC, RCA, Many many many others!!

Good sound and decent picture quality. Like the dual tray and have a lot outputs for connecting several eqpt.

Remote is badly designed. Zoom degrades picture quality. Picture freezes on some dvds.

I bought the SD3109 this player for $187 from Sears. It was a closeout and it was in my price range. It is manufactured in April 1999. The sound is good (not excellent) and the 3D effect is great. I do not have a 5.1 amplifier but do have THX speakers and a Harmon Kardon ProLogic receiver. I use the 3D effect most of time when watching movies. For the price I paid for it I can't complain, I would not have paid for more than $280 for it. It does not read CDRs in gold or blue but does read from low quality silver CDRs. It also reads HP CDRWs from my HP CdWriter. This is a good feature I was looking for otherwise I would have got the APEX DVD player. The price is not much different but the quality of this player is much better than the APEX. If I had more money I would have got the SONY DVP-S550D. The SONY has much better picture & sound quality than the 3109.

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SONY DVP-S550D

Great picture and sound, Price, Quality, Plays HDCD's, built in dolby digital decoder

does not play CD-R's

Got a good deal on this DVD player almost a year ago ($275 from auction). Had no problems to speak of. Great picture and sound. HDCD's sound great and you can really hear a noticeable difference with good stereo equipment.

Great player and I wouldn't trade it for anything!

Great value and excellent quality.

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None

Great Picture, Great Sound

Duel trays are not very useful. Does not play cd-r.

I have owned this machine for approximately 18 months and have not had one problem. I have played over 100 DVD's on this machine and everyone has played without a hitch. I would recomoned this player to anyone. The machine does not play cd-r, but I knew that before I bought it, so it's no big deal. If you want an affordable DVD player that does a great job, then this is the one for you.

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none

Lots of useful features

none

This unit was purchased 5 months ago and has performed flawlessly. There was some concern about the reliability of the two drawer mechanism but so far no problems at all. In fact, having two drawers is very convenient. I purchased mine at Sound Advice for $350. I've seen it for less at U BID.

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none

Simple to operate, works with everthing.. so far (yes, including The Matrix) Has HDCD and dual trays

Can't play CD-Rs

Great player hooked into my Yamaha RX-V595. Never had a problem with any disks including selecting menus in The Matrix. I don't use the built-in decoding, so I can't comment on that, but the sound and the picture have always been excellent.

Great picture, sound

None

I've had this a few months now and it has been rock solid since the day I took it out of the box. It plays everything with exceptional clarity. I was looking a number of entry level DVD players but I could not pass this unit up (got it for less then $300.00 online.) It had so many features that I figurd I could not go wrong.

I compaired the video and audio quality at a number of local AV stores (low end to hight end) and found it to be everything I could ask for.

I think with everything in AV you can compair specs all day long but what matters is what "you" like. For me, you can't beat the Toshiba 3109.

Numbers. There are a lot of them out there so Toshiba SHOULD make decent bug fixes available.

Many bugs, moire patterns, crashes.

I've has this for about a month and I am less than ecstatic with it. I have not used other DVD players so it is hard for me to know if my bad experiences are because of the player, the disc, or the nature of DVD. Some media work perfectly with clear crisp audio and video. Others are distorted and show weird compression artifacts, pixelization, shaking, moire patterns, and heavily aliased (stair-stepping) curves and diagonals.

I have also experienced several "crashes" where the software simply stopped working correctly and the system had to be "rebooted". This seems pretty poor quality to me.

Looks, picture, sound, zoom, remote beeper

haven't come across any . . . yet

Well, I finally found the solution. After returning 2 defective Pioneer 525 (which had excellent picture quality by the way), and a JVC 511 (which worked, but the picture couldn't compare to the Pioneer), I bought the Toshiba SD3109. The picture quality is fantastic, and when zoomed in ONCE, the picture quality only looses the smallest bit sharpness. The sound is spetacular. I hooked it up to my Pioneer digital 'ready' receiver, and the surround system (Infinity RS2's as mains, RS1's as surrounds, SM as center), came to life like never before. And then I turned on the subwoofer. Sonic catastrophy (in the basement apartment that I dwell).
Nevertheless, the Matrix is my official demo DVD, and the Toshiba is now the heart of the system. I did hear complaints about the remote, but what's so hard about holding down the chapter skip buttons to fast foward, or fast rewind, instead of tapping them to skip to the next/previous chapter? This remote was better than the Pioneer's and the JVC's. And with the beep that sounds whenever a button is pressed, what more are people asking for in a 'budget' player? This is a must buy. Everything always works out for the best in the end.

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Pioneer 525, JVC 511