Best DVD player under £100

[Barny79]

Best picture, reliability etc

http://www.richersounds.com/index.ph....php&p=sd220r2

Tosh SD220.

[ferris57]

Or even the tosh sd 330. £98 with a free scart lead (crappy lead of course....but free!)

[Gary Lightfoot]

If you can stretch to £120, the Panasonic S75 is available from digitalpoint for £120 inclusing postage.

Gary.

[bonzobanana]

Originally posted by Barny79
Best picture, reliability etc

Best picture seems to be the Toshiba 330 as its highly rated and competes with models costing 10x more at least for picture quality. Reliability not sure on. Toshiba now have them made for them in China to their specifications.

[SOUNDSTYLE]

I have the Tosh 330 and for the money you can't go wrong.
The picture is unbelievable for the money.

[shoestring25]

Me personally I wouldn't choose a Toshiba player the tosh 220 has trouble with seamless branching and most important of all is a feature that I think is overlooked the ability to output a pal 60 picture from a region 1 disc. By displaying a pal 60 picture instead of an inferior NTSC the r1 picture looks as good as a pal picture from your region 2.

Toshiba and Sony players not output pal 60 but Panasonic and pioneer players do so I would pick a cheep one of those up.

cheers

Talking balony there mate (reg. converting NTSC to PAL 60 is superior)

You don't want to convert NTSC to PAL 60. You want to leave it as NTSC, 60hz.

[NicolasB]

But converting the picture to PAL magically adds an extra hundred lines of resolution to every image!

In fairness, there may be cases where the player does a better job than the television of scaling an NTSC image up to PAL resolution, but yeah, I wouldn't expect it to make much odds most of the time.

[shoestring25]

normal pal is superior to NTSC correct?

well a pal 60 picture looks the same as a normal pal picture.

NTSC picures i have always found look less detailed and the colour is not as good

every player i have ever owned has had the ability to output both a pure NTSC or a PAL 60 picture and the PAL 60 has always looked better.

cheers

There's more to it than that.

Checkout the various R1 v R2 & PAL v NTSC threads.

[The Beekeeper]

Originally posted by miller25
normal pal is superior to NTSC correct?

Why? Ever worked out the bandwidth calculations for PAL vs NTSC DVD signals? They are virtually identical. Just argueing one has more lines than the other is only a tiny part of the equation. I would leave NTSC 60 Hz as just that and not convert to PAL. It just causes to many problems.

Another Toshiba vote, £80 is a bargain and I have never seen any problems in the players I have seen.

I do have a soft spot for Panasonic machines, just wish the SPDIF was better quality though

Pal 60 is superior to NTSC just for the fact that PAl has a superior colour system. The only thing different between PAL 60 and NTSC is the colour system used, the amounts of lines and resoloution remain exactly the same. Also note there is no 'conversion' when you output Pal 60 as some may think, the dvd layer just outputs it as you tell it to and doesn't perform any type of conversion. Most people probably wouldn't notice the difference anyway but Pal 60 is superior, even tho I have never noticed the difference either.

[The Beekeeper]

Can't say I am convinced by this, if it is so superior why doesn't evey player do this as standard rather than just a few cheapo players to deal with older tellys that have NTSC problems?

Originally posted by The Beekeeper
Can't say I am convinced by this, if it is so superior why doesn't evey player do this as standard rather than just a few cheapo players to deal with older tellys that have NTSC problems?

Who said it was so superior?, I said it was virtually the same and that most including me will not notice the difference, as I said before the ONLY difference is the colour system used, same resoloution, same amount of lines and still at 60hz, same frame rate,everything,but just with the Pal colour system.

Taken from a site:

"PAL and NTSC are words and formats that are applied to DVD for convenience, and because of historical convention. There is nothing fundamental about a DVD which makes it either PAL or NTSC, but for simplicity and brevity, I will continue to use these terms throughout this article.

At their heart, DVDs are merely carriers of data files with compressed audio-visual information contained therein. This information can be placed on DVD in one of two resolutions; 720 x 576 pixels (PAL DVDs), or 720 x 480 pixels (NTSC DVDs), and with various frame rates (24, 25, and 30 frames per second are common). The DVD player itself takes this data file and formats it appropriately for display in either PAL or NTSC."

With Dvd players capable of Pal 60 they just output it in PAL 60. Some TV's can't even do PAl 60!. There is no conversion.