Digital Trends
Everyone wants to be an insider, and you can be one too! Choose your poison: sign-up for our Newsletter, join us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter. Do all three and you'll be swimming in the the latest news, reviews, videos and more gadget goodness!
Become a DT soldier! Join us on Facebook and share the best news, guides, videos and other cool information directly with all your friends. Some might even thank you for it!
Join the thousands and follow the best of us on Facebook.
Do you like information in small snippets? Then our Twitter feed is just for you. Follow Digital Trends and you'll be able to catch up daily on our latest content, or even interact directly with our team. Tweet Tweet!
Join the thousands and follow the best of us on Twitter.
That’s Right, Sign-up For Our Monthly Random Prize Drawings and You Could Be That Winner.
Wish I had read these reviews earlier
By: Frank Casanova
February 7, 2008 @ 9:27 AM
What you all said is absolutely correct. What a piece of Toshiba junk. Mine just quite playing all DVDs with the response “Invalid Region” on EVERY DVD. Obviously a malfunction. I’m throwing it in the trash tomorrow!
Rating: 1 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful. Was this user review helpful? Yes | No
Bad
By: Jim
January 22, 2008 @ 10:32 AM
It has never worked right. It freezes constantly. It won’t read disks, won’t open on first command (it takes several commands). Remote is not always effective.
Rating: 1 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful. Was this user review helpful? Yes | No
Glad it was free!!!!
By: ewill
March 10, 2006 @ 10:23 AM
This is NOT a DVD player, it’s a DVD stopper! It does not work. It freezes on each and every DVD not-played with it. I am glad I didn’t put up extra money for it and bought it with Best Buy bucks received with purchase of my DLP. Do not buy, repeat do not buy.
Rating: 1 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful. Was this user review helpful? Yes | No
"most stubborn yet...."
By: Drew
January 11, 2006 @ 9:27 AM
Slow to respond. Buttons on supplied remote and univeral remotes are the same outcome…. any button pressed for more than or less than 1/2 second will not do anything. Only plays my +R discs. However, this unit has played 100’s of discs and CD’s with only bogging down during play-back a couple times. I want it to die so I can buy another.
Rating: 4 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful. Was this user review helpful? Yes | No
Waste of money
By: Greg
July 23, 2005 @ 11:51 AM
I agree with other comments I have read. The picture is excellent, when the unit works. A total digital signal is clearly a feature I must have for my home theater. I was anxious to get a DVD player with HDMI and settled on the Toshiba SD5970 because it was available at my local retailer. BIG MISTAKE. The remote is almost useless. It has to be pointed directly at the unit sensor and it even still may not respond. Using the buttons on the main unit itself may also result in no response. Every time you watch a new movie after turning the unit off you need to reset the picture format for your TV 480p,720p or 1080i. You would think it would have memory??? Most recently the unit began to get stuck on the DVD layer switch. The only way I could find to reset it was to open the tray and restart the movie then locate the last scene viewed. A perfect way to ruin a good movie! Even the restart may result in the unit getting stuck again. Now the unit has progressed to getting stuck at random places on a disc. And when you open the tray to try and reset I find only 1 of 10 times it will accept the disc otherwise it will error “Bad Disc”. It has also just begun to not read brand new discs right out of the box. I thought the problem was a dirty laser lens so I tried using a DVD cleaner with no such luck. The unit is just simply a piece of #$@*. I think this was a first time design effort for a new Toshiba engineer. When I looked at my receipt I thought I had a chance for warranty at 6 months. I dealt with the quirks for too long when I realized it only has a 90 day warranty. Even with 90 days I would guess Toshiba is still getting a lot of warranty complaints. I am sure it does not cost them anything because the unit probably has an internal company cost of $10; or at least that is what it acts like. I am extremely disappointed in such a well known electronics company that I never plan to buy another Toshiba product.
Rating: 1 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful. Was this user review helpful? Yes | No
A very picky, buggy unit...
By: Rusty
June 19, 2005 @ 5:30 AM
Don’t buy this unit unless you want trouble and disappointment. While the picture can be outstanding when the unit works correctly… it very rarely works correctly. It will not read burned DVDs hardly at all and when it does, it displays all sorts of bugs & quirks. It has better success with pressed disks, but still nowhere near what anyone would ever call reliable. Our GoVideo back-up unit now gets 90% of our use while the costly SD5970 just sits there gathering dust. A real lemon in every respect. Some say that Toshiba is exchanging these buggy units for an improved (non-lemon) design, but they wouldn’t do it for me. I love Toshiba’s great laptop computers, but I will never buy a DVD player from them ever again.
Rating: 1 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful. Was this user review helpful? Yes | No
Don't buy this
By: Leonard
May 18, 2005 @ 3:42 AM
I just put my second unit in the trash. The first broke in a week, replaced under warranty. Second made it 5 months. The HDMI was nice, but this unit had the WORST remote I’ve ever seen. Buttons would not respond.
On the otherhand, I just got the Toshiba SD5980 and it’s like it was made by a different company. Completely different in how it operates. I hope it lasts longer than the last model. From the number of “open box” 5970’s available at the retailer I went to, I suspect the 5970 is an embarrasment to Toshiba
Rating: 1 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful. Was this user review helpful? Yes | No