7 out of 7 people found this review helpful.
Junk that works great for about 1 year.
Date of Review: Jun 21, 2003
The Bottom Line: If you lease cars and are happy. If you buy new A/V equipment every year and throw the old away - then I recommend this product.
I work at a repair center and have a fat stack of the 2700-2800 series DVD players. Dozens of them that would be so easy to repair, but are cost prohibitive. We have bets placed on the target month that the stack will reach the ceiling.
If the spindle motor isn't bad, then the power supplies are. Do not expect a long lived machine folks. The spindle motor in these things are the worst I have seen... typical in quality to the spindle motor in a portable CD player.
Actually it is worse, at least the $30 portable CD players have two bearings in their spindle motors, the Toshiba motor has only ONE. It's not a bearing really, just a bronze sleeve bushing. The armature wobbles since DVD's are not perfectly balanced and the commutator brushes fail prematurely. Incredibly, they chose this type of design in a high RPM DVD application. JUNK JUNK JUNK JUNK JUNK JUNK.
This is the most critical mechanical part, and they did this on purpose to limit the life of the machine. They also made the part unavailable so you have no choice but to buy another machine.
Parts ARE NOT AVAILABLE TO FIX YOUR INVESTMENT. Actually they are, but no sane person would every pay to fix their machine. I imagine there is a law out there that requires parts for a consumer product to be available for "X" number of years after the date of manufacture.
So to comply with this law, these parts are indeed made available - at an expense so great that it can only imply "planned obsolescence" of your purchase.
For example:
Replacement video MPEG decoder board for this $170 machine is $600-700!!!!!
Flimsy single bushing spindle motor that ALWAYS fails (about a 99 cent part) is $220!!!!! There is nothing special about the motor... it is a disposable toy grade motor. But a custom design that is not available anywhere else.
Power supply uses a "custom" Toshiba driver IC that approaches $20!!! Other manufacturers use a commonly available part which is on the order of just over a dollar. There is nothing magical about the $20 chip other than its price, and the forcing of it in the system's design. It is purposefully held back from consumer distribution. A switching power supply repair that should cost the owner $5.00 in parts (FET, driver IC, fused resistor, zener diode and opto-isolator) approaches $40.00 because of the custom "driver IC" they use.
So instead of a power supply repair coming to 30-40 dollars; it is now $80.00. Thirty-fourty dollars is reasonable. Eighty is not. Not too many are going to get it fixed when they can buy a new one for that price. All because of a purposely hiked up expense on a single component that commonly fails when a voltage surge hits.
Buy Toshiba, buy throw-away! Depending on use it may last years or months. Definitely use a good quality Surge arrestor to protect the powersupply FET and its driver IC that is insanely expensive. It will buy you time until the shoddy spindle motor dies.
If you want a DVD player that will last, make absolute sure that it has a BRUSHLESS SPINDLE MOTOR. Don't settle for less. A $20 generic CD-ROM drive has a brushless spindle motor in it. If a $20 CD-ROM gets a brushless spindle motor, so can a 80-170 dollar DVD player!
A brushless motor does not have mechanical brushes that wear out and often use high quality bearings. Brush type motors typically have a lifespan of 2000 hours. Equivalent to a light bulb. Brush motors are cheap and great for eject tray motors and laser tracking drives because of their intermittent use. A spindle motor runs all the time when your machine is in use. If you use your DVD player a lot, 2000 hours is not very much time.
Brushless motors have operational lifespans limited only by the quality of the bearings since there are no brushes to wear out. Brushless motors typically operate 10,000 to 100,000's of hours before failure.
