Hi,
Just bought the Toshiba SD-185E from Tesco.
First thing to mention is that try the store first rather than Tesco Direct.
I almost bought it from direct but noticed that at £24.97 I was 3p under the free delivery and there was a charge of £6 odd just to get it to the store.
Called in my local Tesco and low and behold, there were 3 on the shelf and at the same price. (actually got a little bit off for new tax but....whatever).
Anyway, not put it through its paces yet but can confirm that it is a DivX certified player, which will also play subtitles for DivX files.
As for the aspect and the small letter box, well it has on the settings menue the ability to display in several formats, Original, height fit, width fit, auto fit and pan & scan.
This is not a zoom feature and not an aspect feature as the aspect is set seperatly as either 4:3 or 16:9.
In original, yes you do get the very small letter box image that does not even reach the sides, but in "width fit" the picture is correct.
I am viewing on a Panasonic 42" plasma set, so would be very critical of artifacts etc, however the picture quality is superb, very supprised myself as I have been using an E-buyer £20 unit for over a year until last week I tried a firmware update in order to enable DivX subtitles and I killed it.
The only down side I can imediatly see is that it has a coaxial digital audio output rather than optical and as my home theatre system is optical, I have now lost the capability of AC3 5.1 audio from DivX. (I may be able to get round this though).
Also, it does NOT have a USB port, but don't consider that to be a loss. I would asume that anyone who gets a movie on their PC would probably burn them to CD / DVD disc anyway, rather than to watch on USB stick and then do what... store the USB sticks?
So don't worry about no USB support.
So, for just under £25, its appears to be a cracking set.
Cheers