Toshiba BDX6400 Blu-ray Player - Review

[gadgtfreek]

Toshiba does a good job by surprising me with the exterior design of the BDX6400 Blu-ray player, but fell short when it came to the internals. The video processing capability of the player lags behind its rivals, falling short on the Blu-ray benchmark by a significant degree.

The larger problems to me are the occasional lock-ups, the unfinished UI, and the overall slow user experience. Even with the small size of the BDX6400 it needs a faster processor to provide a better experience. It also needs at least another firmware revision to take care of these lock-ups and pauses, as well as the unfinished onscreen interface.

What the Toshiba BDX6400 is offering is a compact player with 4K scaling but not one that is really price competitive today. Since most people with a 4K set are not space limited for their Blu-ray player, alternatives like the Sony BDP-S790 or the Oppo BDP-103 make more sense. I wish the BDX6400 performed better as I am happy to see someone producing something different, but it doesn't perform well enough to justify the price.

Home Theater Hifi

 

[teachsac]

Pass on Toshiba, Philips, and Samsung.

S~

 

[king3pj]

I really like the compact design on this player but I will never own another Toshiba player. I got a BDX3000 a couple years ago included free with my Toshiba 3D TV and two pairs of glasses from Amazon. This thing is a bigger piece of junk than any modern electronic device I have ever owned. I love the TV and it was still a good deal but I don't trust their blu-ray players. I gave it to my parents and quickly went back to using my PS3. Netflix would play one episode or movie well enough. If you tried to play a second one when you were done it wouldn't load though. It would just get stuck on the buffer screen forever. Once it was stuck on the buffer screen there was no way to get off it except for a hard reset. To get around this you had to exit the Netflix app and reboot the player between each episode.

The problems don't end with Netflix though. The player constantly locked up requiring you to pull the plug and reset. Even when it worked fine for your blu-ray with no lockups and shut down like normal there were still problems. The next time you tried to turn it back on there was a 50/50 chance if it would respond. This means instead of just hitting the power button on the remote or even getting up and pushing the button on the device itself you had to unplug it and wait for it it do it's bootup again.

There has since been a firmware update to fix the power problem and some of the lockups. I say some of the lockups because it still occasionally freezes when trying to play a blu-ray and it still freezes 100% of the time if you try to watch two Netflix episodes without shutting down. It also looks like it is doing a constant reboot when it is turned off now. The normal touch light button is supposed to be red when the player is off. That's how it was until the new firmware. Now it goes from red to white indicating it's turned on even when it isn't. All the other buttons like play, pause, RW,FF etc light up when it does this too. it just keeps cycling between the red off light and these flashing lights over and over again with nothing displaying on the screen. This isn't just me getting a lemon either. The amazon reviews for that player are currently at 2 1/2 stars with most of them complaining about the same problems I had.

http://www.amazon.com/Toshiba-BDX30...IXY/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?showViewpoints=1

The good news is that it responds to the remote power button even when it is doing this now. My parents are usually able to turn it on and watch a blu-ray and then turn it back off without a freeze now. The video and audio quality are no different than the PS3 in my eyes so that is a plus. I just don't know how a product so flawed could have made it through testing. I bought them a Roku so they wouldn't have to deal with the terrible, freezing Netflix and Amazon apps anymore.