Here’s what happened with my Toshiba SD 4990 Upconverting DVD player – within a month of purchasing it, I noticed problems when playing the DVD-R tyep of videos. It would stall and drag at pretty much anywhere, sometimes almost every 5 seconds. This had nothing to do with the double-layered DVDs transitioning between chapters – this was purely a physical glitch of not being able to scan a perfectly clean disk properly. When I went over the same parts again, it wouldn’t skip, and the disk was also fine in my laptop drive, so that means that the disk was perfectly fine – the dvd player could not read it.

And then, recently, it just died on me. While playing a disk, the stalling got excessive, so I turned it off and back on – and nothing came on. I got a garbled greenish screen for a bit, and then nil. Zip. Zero. Nada.

I took it back to Futureshop for a warranty repair – they said that Toshiba does not authorize them to do repairs, and all they can do is give me a 1-800 # where I can find an authorized repair station for Toshibas. So now I have to call, drive, and drop the bloody thing off, while I can’t watch my movies.

This DVD player has been an absolute nightmare. I already wrote a post about the shortcomings of the Toshiba SD 4990 Upconverting DVD player before. Let me summarize again.

• Poor design of the remote.
• Poor interface, and slow reactions to buttons.
• Nothing spectacular in quality – it’s more or less the same as any other upconversion DVD players.
• Trouble playing all DVD formats – it stalls and skips and scrubs.

Bottom Line – STAY AWAY FROM THIS MODEL.