Anyone who’s listened for any length of time to the excellent UK DVD Review podcast will have heard about the reboot of Battlestar Galactica which has been going on for the last couple of years. He doesn’t so much recommend it so much as positively evangelise it, and barely an episode goes by that you won’t hear the “previously on Battlestar Galactica” soundbite.

Based on his clear enthusiasm for the show and after talking to him about it a couple of times I ordered the 2003 miniseries on DVD (how could I say no for £5.99?), thinking that the last time I took a chance on TV sci-fi I ended up with a zealous love of Firefly. I’ve since bought the first season on DVD because this is yet another excellent piece of modern sci-fi, and considering that I’m someone who wouldn’t have been seen dead watching Star Trek only a couple of years ago I seem to be becoming quite the devotee.

Galactica isn’t quite as high on the list as Firefly but since that seems to be all but dead this at least gives me some decent ongoing sci-fi to follow. If you’re interested I really suggest checking out the information in the Wikipedia entry and picking up the miniseries which is available dirt cheap now.

It’s started doing it again. The skipping isn’t as bad or as consistent as it used to be but that annoying PAL quirk is at it again. I tried switching it to NTSC but it really looks a lot worse and causes some tearing and frame rate problems, presumably from changing the signal from PAL to NTSC. I’ll phone up Toshiba tomorrow and see if they can help at all. If not it’s going back and I’m changing it for the slightly more expensive Samsung DVD-HD950.

The DVD player that I ordered last week arrived yesterday so I fired it up to play around with some of the features and I’ve been having some weird problems which, even more weirdly, seem to have fixed themselves a day later. It’s nice when problems just go away but it’s not common for technical issues to just vanish.

It does look very pretty (the blue light on the disc tray’s annoying but can be made bearable with some electrical tape) and is an impressively small player, around half the height of my current SD-220E. It’s also nice and quiet, and is pretty much inaudible when it’s running. Now for the bad stuff…

First of all, through SCART at least, PAL stuff looked awful. There was some weird grey effect superimposed over everything that was very noticeable in dark scenes, and it was on every PAL DVD I tried. NTSC stuff looked fine and by turning on the force NTSC option all DVDs looked OK, but since NTSC doesn’t look as good (it’s 480 lines as opposed to 576 in PAL) that’s not my ideal option. Even more annoying was that all DVDs would skip every few minutes. Just a tiny blip and a few frames, but it was distracting as hell and I couldn’t get rid of it with any of the options.

So I plugged it back in today and set it up for when I was going to call Toshiba and see if there was a firmware update or anything, but after turning the video output back to RGB (I’d put it on composite to see if the problems persisted) all was well. PAL DVDs looked nice and sharp and, touch wood, so far no skipping at all. I’ve got Dodgeball playing since it was one of them that was skipping a lot last night and it’s most of the way through with no problems.

Now that it’s working like it’s supposed to it’s good player with nice sound and picture, and the fact that it’s silent is good. When the TV arrives I can try out some stuff through HDMI and HD/progressive scan to see how that looks.