Toshiba BDX2000

The HD DVD company's first Blu-Ray box

Review Toshiba is late to the Blu-ray party, having waited a decent interval after the death of HD-DVD. The BDX2000 - oh, how futuristic products used to seem, just by adding the millennium to their name - is its first offering. It’s a sleek unit, with a pull-down front panel that hides the disk tray, display, controls and an SD card slot.

Toshiba's BDX2000: unusual, but not unattractive styling

Beneath the flap, there are power, pause, stop, play and eject buttons to the left, with the disc tray in the centre and the dot matrix display at the right. The display is visible when the flap’s closed, and the overall effect is quite pleasing.

The BDX2000 supports BD Live, linked through its Ethernet port. In fact, that’s all it supports – you can’t update the firmware over the internet, and have to download new firmware releases then burn them to disc instead.

The main menu is straightforward, and uncluttered, with a set of icons that are selected using the remote, which itself feels a little plasticky, and not quite weighty enough. Delving deeper into the menus, there are some odd quirks. Where most BD Live players have a simple setting to enable or disable the facility, on the BDX2000 it’s buried under custom network preferences, alongside such consumer-scaring options as IP addresses.

The display shines through the front panel

There are, though, some other useful options not found on many players, like audio test tones, and adjustments for relative volume levels, as well as adjustable audio delay for the HDMI output, which helps to ensure perfect sync.