Toshiba SD-3990 Progressive Scan DVD Player

Havng previously bought an "all region & any region" DVD player from another company, different brand, that did NOT play DVD's from other regions, this was a second and last attempt to be able to watch the DVD's friends have sent us from England (region 2) and our other overseas DVD's. I am delighted. It does everything they said it would. It plays the DVD's we have from regions 1, 2 and 4, as well as home burned DVD's from all three regions. The quality & TV picture is excellent, it's easy to use, lightweight and also looks good. We have a Toshiba TV and region 1 DVD player, so we know & like the brand, and North Star did a fantastic job adjusting it to play all regions. I highly recommend this as a very good basic DVD player that will allow you to watch all your DVD's from other regions. Read more

For three months this DVD player worked fine. It's made by Toshiba but modified by a 3rd party - in this case, Northstar Electronics. They modify it so it will play all regions. In the first 90 days we used the player about a dozen times when it suddenly ceased to operate for no reason whatsoever. I tried to use it one afternoon and it just wouldn't work anymore. The player turns on, and the drawer can be opened and closed, but otherwise it will not play any disc from any region, nor will it play CDs. After some research I discovered that faulty modifications often result in this kind of problem with a player. I cannot recommend this product or Northstar Electronics. I suggest spending more and getting a player that has not been modified in-house, but instead was manufactured specifically to play multiple region DVDs. Read more

For a cheap dvd player that plays both NTSC and PAL along with other common formats, it's a good deal. I used to have a great little Cyberhome DVD player which died and so far this has turned out to be a good bedroom replacement. Video/Audio Quality looks decent though hard to tell because my bedroom TV is an old cheap tube tv. This doesn't have a lot of bells and whistles and I wouldn't use on my nice 1080P LCD, but for anything else it's good. Read more

This is mainly a commentary on some of the other reviews. Not a dispute, just my own observations. 1. I have had mine since 2007 (it is now July 2010) and it still works like new (others have reported that theirs stopped working after a short time). 2. If you watch closely, you will see the occasional subtle skip in playback of a region 2 DVD. This is due to the difference in frame rate between the PAL and NTSC systems. PAL playback is just a tad slower than NTSC (25 frames per second vs. 29.97 frames per second) and so the player has to correct for this in regular intervals. Compared to my experience with loading PAL-encoded DVDs into the movie making software (set to NTSC) on my computer (no, I am not bootlegging movies!), where the audio and video get highly unsynchronized after a few minutes, I'd say this DVD player does a fine job. Read more

This model DVD player, whether hacked for all region play or not, has some serious durability issues; take a look at the reviews for the SD-3990 elsewhere on the site and you'll see that an alarming number of reviewers found that the unit failed within six months. Mine packed up after seven months of light use; the laser array failed, meaning that it could not read any disc at all, and the part could not be replaced because Toshiba doesn't make spare parts for this model. That should tell you that this is a cheap player manufactured in the expectation that it will fail in short order. Not really acceptable for a company of Toshiba's standing. Sure, it worked fine for a while, but don't buy this model unless you're happy to take a 50-50 that it'll break within six months. You could ship it back to Toshiba, but aside from the cost and inconvenience, when I did that I got a different model that was not all region. So all of my UK DVDs are now worthless. Steer clear unless you want to buy a disposable DVD player. Read more