You probably don’t like being hassled by too many functions crammed into a small box. Honestly, that annoys me sometimes too. So I searched for a player that would be useful but not complex, something that would just serve its purpose.

Fortunately the search was not long. I chanced upon one of Toshiba’s DVD players, which has been christened SD280EKTB. It was exactly what I had in mind, simple, handy, decent looking and affordable. The Toshiba SD280E is basically a DVD player that plays the whole gamut of media formats. It plays all kinds of CDs like Audio, DA, R and RW. In DVD it plays formats like video, (+/-) R, R DL, RW and ROM. You can also play Mp3 on it. If you have a video CD, don’t worry it plays that one too.

To make the picture viewing more enjoyable it adopts PAL progressive. It also has options of slow motion and variable zoom. It also has icon on-screen display.

In order to enhance the audio quality it applies 3D Virtual Surround Sound. It makes use of Dolby Digital and DTS technologies. Through the former it makes use of six totally independent channels of digital sound and through the latter it adopts a different system for encoding six channel digital surround sound. The final outcome is a treat for the audiophiles.

It comes fitted with five different kinds of connections including analogue 2 channel audio, co-axial audio, component video out put, composite video and Scart (RGB). The component video input connection delivers very high quality video images and is the best connection for DVD video pictures.

You may think that in today’s world there are so many other options available then why this. My answer would be in spite of all that such players from technology powerhouse like Toshiba still hold their ground.