Page 1 of New DVD player - Samsung DVD-HD850 or Toshiba SD360E?

Hi

Please excuse the lack of technical know how, but I`m looking to replace my 7 year old Wharfedale (for which I cannot complain about value for money really) with a DVD player that upscales through HDMI onto HD ready TVs. Reading through various websites I was lead to believe the Toshiba one was the one for me, but now I`ve read about the Samsung one and I don`t know who to believe!

I only want it for watching region 1 and region 2 dvds, and maybe some DVD-Rs if I ever get round to burning any.

Does anyone have either of these players and would you recommend it? Or is there a third option lurking about to confuse me even more. One of the main reasons that the above 2 have made my list is the price of around £80 each, with hdmi lead included apparently.

Thanks in advance.

I bought a Samsung DVD-R145 just before christmas, basically the same as the 860 but records too.

The picture on it is very good there is a noticable difference in quality, it is connected to a 40" Samsung LCD via HDMI lead, our old player is a Toshiba SD220 that was connected via component.

My only complaints are that it is a little slow to respond, you turn it on and have to wait a few seconds before anything happens, then press eject and wait a couple more seconds before the tray pops out, put your disk in and wait a few more seconds before it starts playing.

Not sure if it is because it is a recorder so needs to scan the disk to see what you have stuck in etc, but the old Toshiba would respond immideatly.

The reason I went for the Sammy over a Toshiba was it is remote hacakable, most of our collection is Region 1 so this was very important and it was a fair but slimmer and a lot nicer looking than the Toshiba.

The other thing it does is play DivX files, plays very well but if you FF or RW the sound goes out of sync with the picture. Again this is our first DivX player so not sure if they all do this or not.


All the best

Gerald.

I`ve had this player for nearly 12 months now & cannot fault it..

Easily remote hackable to multiregion & plays divx too.

HDMI lead isn`t included though.

http://www.currys.co.uk/martprd/store/cur_page.jsp?BV_SessionID=@@@@1179154590.1172387940@@@@&BV_EngineID=ccejaddkfemijifcflgceggdhhmdgmi.0&page=Product&fm=11&sm=1&tm=0&sku=585042&category_oid=-30719

I have the Samsung HD950, which is the same as the 850 but with a few more bells and whistles. I think it`s a solid DVD player although I prefer the component picture to the HDMI picture. I have a Samsung LCD as well, and the upscaling makes the picture worse in my opinion, you`re better sticking to 576p/480p (although the difference is very small)

One annoying thing about the Samsung DVD player, it can`t detect PAL/NTSC, which means if you`ve been watching a PAL DVD and want to watch a NTSC DVD then you need to go into the DVD player menu and change from PAL to NTSC. It will play if you forget to change, but NTSC played while stuck on PAL makes the picture VERY jittery.