I just recently bought the SD K970 from Costco (didn't open it yet) but I was wondering about opinions on this player. It was only $59.99 after coupon so its really cheap upconverting player.

I tried googling and even searching on this forum for some info about this player but there seems to be no info available. This model does look like the SD 6000 player though so I thought it might be just repackaged for Costco.

I bought this player to go with my cousins new Samsung HDTV. She is still using a really old player with composite cables so I thought this should really help her TV out a lot.

Hi jokerfish,

This doesn't help you, but I just wanted to chime in and say I bought one from Costco too, also at $59.99 with the coupon.

I only turned it on and tried to play a few minutes of different types of DVDs on it to get a feel for how they looked (an action movie, an animated movie, one in 4:3 screen format, a DVD-R, and so on).

They looked fine, but I dunno, didn't blow me away. But I do like the small size of this player, and the tidy look of having one HDMI cable to connect it to the TV. And I like the zoom feature, but I imagine they all have that.

Thanks for that.
Hopefully it will look ok on the samsung...

Does it play all(most) disc formats like it says on the box?

Hey, im having a problem. I have the thing hooked up with HDMi on my cousins samsung ln-t3253h tv and its not displaying 4:3 for the Friends DVDs....

I was wondering wether or not this is the TV or the Player...the tv has the Just Fit setting on which is used to display the full pixels. So im thinking its the player that isnt doing the job. I have it set at auto fit but its still displaying Friends at 16x9

The player looks pretty good for a cheap player....but I may be biased since they were using composite cables previously with their Mintek player :p

Hey, im having a problem. I have the thing hooked up with HDMi on my cousins samsung ln-t3253h tv and its not displaying 4:3 for the Friends DVDs....

I was wondering wether or not this is the TV or the Player...the tv has the Just Fit setting on which is used to display the full pixels. So im thinking its the player that isnt doing the job. I have it set at auto fit but its still displaying Friends at 16x9

The player looks pretty good for a cheap player....but I may be biased since they were using composite cables previously with their Mintek player :p

go into the setup menu, there should be an option to set it for choice of 4x3/16x9.

There is for the TV shape setting and I have that at 16x9 since the TV is widescreen. Plus when I set that up at 4x3 it did absolutely nothing....This is a strange problem for me. Ive checked over the settings on the TV and the dvd player and cant seem to find why thats happening.

If you read the manual you'll find the 4:3 setting is only available when the hdmi is set to 480- see pg 29 "Video Setting details"last paragraph.

Thanks for that.

I did not notice that but it is a weird fefature to have....You would think that it would display at the specified ratio of the disc....

It bothers me but its ok with my cousin, so its fine.

If you read the manual you'll find the 4:3 setting is only available when the hdmi is set to 480- see pg 29 "Video Setting details"last paragraph.

sh*t, i forgot about that. its true.
but im finding that my new-ish tosh hd-a2 and a30 will do the 4x3 @ 720p and 1080i, a whole new experience for me.

I tried out the SD-K970 for about a week on my 37in Samsung TV. The picture was a little nicer with the SDK970 using via HDMI, but not a huge difference compared to my old Toshiba SD-K620 DVD player that goes through S-Video. The color and contrast was slightly better on the 970 through HDMI, but the detail looked about the same as the 620 through S-Video. There was a user experience problem that I found by accident. If I pressed "progressive" on the 970 remote, I would lose the picture and I would have to wait a minute or 2 and press "progressive" again to get the picture back. Sometimes I would have to turn off the player and turn it back on again before I could get it back in the right mode. This really isn't a problem for me, but I could see a this be a huge problem for my young kids if this button was accidently pressed (which is how I discovered this in the first place). I don't know if this is a common experience with other upconverting players but I decided to take the 970 back since the slight picture improvement over my 620 wasn't worth the potential frustration for my kids.

when i bought this set from costco i didnt realize the only way to upconvert was thru using hdmi. i have component wires running thru my walls from my tv that is hanging on the wall, to my old dvd player. so i was hoping to just throw out the old broken one and put in this one. but, it wont upconvert with component. it would be too expensive to hire someone to run a very very long hdmi wire thru my walls just for this, so my question is two-fold:
1) is there any dvd player that upconverts using component?
2) when best buy installed my tv on the wall and connected my old dvd player and cablevision hd cable box, they told me component was just as good as hdmi. it was just cheaper (since i needed such an incredibly long wire to run thru my wall), and the upside, they said, was that there would be a shorter delay than hdmi when changing channels on cablevision's scientific atlanta hd dvr cable box. was i mislead?!?!?!?

when i bought this set from costco i didnt realize the only way to upconvert was thru using hdmi. i have component wires running thru my walls from my tv that is hanging on the wall, to my old dvd player. so i was hoping to just throw out the old broken one and put in this one. but, it wont upconvert with component. it would be too expensive to hire someone to run a very very long hdmi wire thru my walls just for this, so my question is two-fold:
1) is there any dvd player that upconverts using component?
2) when best buy installed my tv on the wall and connected my old dvd player and cablevision hd cable box, they told me component was just as good as hdmi. it was just cheaper (since i needed such an incredibly long wire to run thru my wall), and the upside, they said, was that there would be a shorter delay than hdmi when changing channels on cablevision's scientific atlanta hd dvr cable box. was i mislead?!?!?!?

1) Yes there is, the Neodigits Helios H4000. One of the few players on the market that can and it's available from costco no less. Most "pro" reviews seem to indicate that it's a solid player overall with good build and plenty of features.

2) Both connections can carry the same VIDEO information. There are differences between component and HDMI but for your situation the spec that matters is HDCP: HDMI can be encrypted for copy-protection and Component cannot. Nearly all upconvert DVD players will only output an HD picture over HDMI- the model above is obviously one of the exceptions.


To the OP: while toshiba's HD DVD players have a good reputation their SD upconvert players do not. I had an SD-5000 (not sure the relation to your model though it looks the same...) and ended up returning it after a week. Turns out most Toshiba SD upconvert players use a Zoran chip, same one running in several Samsung players, that would randomly freeze on playback.
I experienced this issue nearly every time I watched a movie start to finish- all of a sudden the image would freeze and then restart a minute later. This would happen several times and no I'm not confusing this with the layer change. :rolleyes:

If you're simply looking for a solid player and concerned about price, I would suggest the Phillips 5982. While I ended up returning this unit also it wasn't due to any functional shortcoming. The player is stacked with useful features (like the USB port) and is easy to use with the included remote. It's also a very stylish machine and can be found for next to nothing at most B&M stores.
IMO in this price range upconvert players won't do much for anything but the most bargain displays. And that is why I returned the Phillips, the PQ was just not noticeably better than my old 480i player. I did like the Phillips much more than the Sony and for the retail price of the Phillips it's a no-brainer if you just need a solid playback device.

For me I ended up with an HD-A3. 10 free movies and a lower price is what it took to sway me from an oppo 980h purchase.

thank you sage11x!
i just ordered the helios like u recommended, and will return the toshiba. im also glad that i wasnt mislead about the component hookup best buy did for me, so thanks for letting me know.

Thanks for the answers everyone. Right now my cousin is happy with it so I wont bother any more. Sooner or later they will get a Blu-Ray or something hopefully.

I also bought it at Costco with the $10 off coupon and just installed it this week. Here are my connection details and then some subjective impressions about this player.

- SD-K970 HDMI output connected to the Video 2 HDMI input of a Sony DDW995 receiver with the cable included with the DVD player. No other AV connections from/to the DVD player.
- The DDW995 HDMI out connected to HDMI in of a Samsung FP-T5884 (yeh baby!)

So I throw in a standard def DVd and am expecting to be blown away. But not even close!! The picture doesn;t look anything out of ordinary that we are used to with older DVD players and not quite as good as what we get with the XBOX 360 as our DVD player (hooked into the same setup XBOX HDMI out to DDW995 HDMI in). I did all the right things, setup the TV as 16:9, set the player output to be 1080p etc.

The sound was most interesting. All I could get was 2-channel sound so i went to the DVD player's setup menu>Audio and there are three settings: off, PCM and Bitstream. It was defaulted to PCM so i switched to Bitstream and sarted getting multi-channel sound through all the speakers. Here's the interesting part though, i read through the SD-K970 manual and it says that only the PCM setting should be used with HDMI, to output multi-channel sound I would have to connect a digital audio cable also. So apparently, it doesn;t output multi-channel sound through HDMI. But it took my Bitstream setting and seemed to be working!! Hmm...??

Anyway, not quite blown away by this. Will watch a movie tonight and if still the same experience, it goes back.

4/7/08 update: watched I Am Legend last night and remain disappointed. Will pack it up and return this week.

i bought this at costco too.
hooked up to my 42" vizio that i also bought at costco.

i think the dvd's do show more detail then with my old player. we watched Ratituio and it really did look good.

i have a question though. it is all set up to 1080p but i have noticed that it does not fill the screen as i thought it would. my out put is 1080p according to the info on the tv so i know it is working. we watched "nightwatch" and that did use the entire screen and then put in part 2 "daywatch" and it was once again cropped to 16:9 with black bars on top and bottom. now does it go according to the dvd or is is supposed to upconvert to full screen?

I was at Costco today and was considering this player and it was listed at $69.99. They also had the toshiba sdk980 sitting right next to the sdk970 for the same price. Anyone know what the difference between the two is as the spec cards said exactly the same thing the the units looked slightly different. Costco also had the Sony DVPNS601HP for $74.99 which also had similar specs. I google the Sony model and nothing comes up so wondering if anyone knows anything about it. How does the Toshiba and Sony compare when it comes to picture quality and upconverting?

jcg

Here's my user observations....

Bought a Costco and hooked up to my 50" Panasonic plasma via HDMI, audio: digital coax to my 6.1 receiver (no optical audio on SD-K970, but probably doesn't matter ? ).

Compared the upsampling of the SD-K970 with the upsampling of the 50" Panasonic using Lord of the Rings DVD (switched between the output modes: 480p, 720p, 1080p). Found that there was no real difference except that the SD-K970 seemed to have more temporal noise in the darker areas. Therefore, I just chose to set it at 480p, and let the Panasonic upsample.

The other cheaper non-upsampling progressive scan Costco DVD player didn't have digital audio output, so I have no need to return this. I'm really waiting for a decent Blu-ray player to come down to ~$200 or so... maybe by Christmas 2008?

(I did own the Costco Sony Blu-ray player for a short time, but it was too much money for a lot of issues, so I returned that for the $60 SD-K970.)

i have a question though. it is all set up to 1080p but i have noticed that it does not fill the screen as i thought it would. my out put is 1080p according to the info on the tv so i know it is working. we watched "nightwatch" and that did use the entire screen and then put in part 2 "daywatch" and it was once again cropped to 16:9 with black bars on top and bottom. now does it go according to the dvd or is is supposed to upconvert to full screen?

Is it an issue of the aspect ratio of the titles? See: http://www.highdefdigest.com/news/show/High-Def_FAQ/Joshua_Zyber/High-Def_FAQ:_Why_Dont_the_Black_Bars_Go_Away/764

-Bill