Which player for DVD-r's?
 

I did a search but nothing came up. I've always had Toshiba players and have been happy with the performance but I need to make a change. I have allot of DVD-r's. Home movies and things like that. My Polaroid portable plays them just fine, but my Toshiba 3980 keeps pixelating and skipping. I replaced my 5108 with the 3980 because that was doing it and I attributed it to being a pretty old player. The new one is even worse. It seems like it has trouble focusing and the edges are soft then sharper. It's very noticeable. I have a 55" WS Mitsubishi but it's a few years old with only component inputs so I didn't opt for anything higher up the line, as I was told the only difference was the HDMI video cable.

So is it Toshiba? Is it a bad player?

It took me a couple months to edit years of home movies to really cool DVD's now I can't play them. Man am I torqued.

Did you use name brand media or generic -I found out that sooner or later the generic brands would fail and i have stuck w/CompUSA blank dvd-r's.

You call CompUSA "brand media"?

It is mostly pretty junky media just labeled with CompUSA's name on it. Much like Memorex but worse.

http://www.videohelp.com/dvdmedia.ph...+or+List+Media

Never had a problem with CompUSA dvd-r's.

I've used several different brands with the same results. Memorex, Verbatim, SONY and Eagle. I think I actually had the best results with the Eagle brand, but they all pretty much do it.

The problem might be with the reflectivity of a DVD-R vs. RW. If you go to http://www.videohelp.com/dvdplayers and enter "Toshiba 3980" in the search box, you'll get a list of the kinds of media that work well in that player. DVD-R is not on the list and there are reports of problems people have had with it.

Picked up the SONY H70 a couple weeks ago. Plays them just fine. Apparently Toshiba is the not the machine of choice for DVD-r. Spoke to the manager at Best Buy about my dillema. He took a few dollars off the new machine for my trouble.

In my experience, Toshiba isn't the machine of choice for playing just about any DVDs anymore. Back in the early days, they seemed to be tops, but I've seen and had nothing but trouble with the more recent models.