Welcome to a laptop battery specialist of the Toshiba Ac Adapter
The first thing that jumps out when you look at the BDX3300 is how much smaller it is than your average Blu-ray deck, measuring just 360mm wide. Also attracting attention is the silver triangle at the bottom of the fascia, adding a subtle touch of glamour that you won't find on the entry-level BDX1300.
Upon closer inspection however, the build quality is a little lightweight for our liking, with plasticky casing and buttons, plus the LED display is too small to read easily from the other side of the room.
On the back, Toshiba hasn't exactly gone to town on sockets, supplying only the bare essentials – HDMI output, coaxial digital audio output and an Ethernet port for hooking up to a router. Sparse, but it's fine for basic setups.
There's also a USB port on the front with battery such as Toshiba ACC10H Ac Adapter , Toshiba PA2438U Ac Adapter , Toshiba PA2500U Ac Adapter , Toshiba Portege 4000 Ac Adapter , Toshiba Satellite A10 Ac Adapter , Toshiba Tecra A1 Ac Adapter , Toshiba Satellite R15 Ac Adapter , Toshiba Satellite A100 Ac Adapter , Toshiba Tecra 8000 Ac Adapter , Toshiba Satellite 1405 Ac Adapter , Toshiba Satellite 5205 Ac Adapter , Toshiba Satellite 2800 Ac Adapter that allows you to play digital media from storage devices. You'll also need to bring this port into play if you want to watch BD Live content, as there's no built in memory.
Heading the bill are the online services, which include the essential BBC iPlayer plus YouTube, Acetrax and Picasa. Unlike players from Samsung, LG, Sony or Panasonic they're not given their own graphical GUI with a fancy name – they're just buried within the deck's rather dull main menu.
Although this selection seems a bit stingy, it's a case of quality over quantity; offering four apps that you're very likely to use, rather than bombarding you with puzzles and games that you're probably never going to use. What's more, Acetrax offers a better range of movies than the en vogue Netflix.
And if you own a wireless router these services are easy to access thanks to the deck's built-in Wi-Fi adapter, which supports the 802.11b/g/n standards. That's a real boon, as many companies would make you fork out for an optional WLAN dongle at this price.
You can also use the BDX3300 to stream digital files from a server on your home network, such as a PC, although I couldn't get it to find the files on my laptop during the test, despite other players having no trouble.
Rounding up the features are the bread and butter Blu-ray stuff – Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD Master Audio decoding/bitstream output, 1080p upscaling, 24fps output and a range of picture tweaks under the Video Adjust section of the setup menu. You can set the levels of brightness, contrast, hue and colour saturation, and choose from three sharpness presets – low, middle and high.
Operation
Operating the BDX3300 isn't plain sailing. The remote is a fiddly affair, with tiny, spongy buttons that all look very similar. Thankfully, owners of iPads, iPhones and Android devices can download an app that lets you operate the player and Toshiba's TVs.
Also hindering the BDX3300's usability is the lacklustre onscreen presentation. It's fairly easy to follow and responds well, but looks dull. The Media Center menu, where you'll find the connected services and USB content, is simply a box that lists the various files and folders. Superficial stuff perhaps, but when you compare it with the dazzling menus on Samsung's latest players for instance, it seems positively prehistoric.
In its defence though, it's easy to setup from the start thanks to the wizards that fire up when you first boot up. It covers all the essentials except for network configuration, which is handled within the setup menu.