I picked up the Toshiba SD-4800 and have played around with it a little bit. My initial impression is that I'm very impressed. Nice little machine.
The zoom function does exactly what I was hoping for and then some. I put in Rounders and hit the zoom button and it displays it the way it should plus the subtitles are in the right place. Yay! I put in my Avia disc and went to the overscan tests. It showed the normal 5% overscan all the way around. I hit the "-" zoom button twice and it drops the overscan to less than 1% all the way around. Way cool! No more overscan issues.
Another cool function is that the player is capable of decoding closed captions internally. You may remember I had a question last fall about closed captions and progressive scan televisions. I found out that TVs cannot decode closed captions from a progressive signal, only interlaced. I put Goldmember (which has closed captions, but no subtitles) in the player and told it to decode the captions for me. The SD-4800 displayed the captions as part of the video signal. The TV doesn't need to decode the captions. Very cool!
Now I just need to watch a whole movie and decide whether I like the video performance of this player. My initial reaction is that I can't see any difference between it and my Sony, but only watching it for an extended period will really tell me how good the video is.
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I DO understand your problem, which is precisely why I mentioned overscan. If you reduced the overscan percentage,to say 0%, then when you used your video expand mode, the "Zoom" your TV does might not crop ANY of the subtitles at all, since you would not be Zooming the picture that is already overscanned by 5%. Do you see what I'm saying.....
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I see what you're saying, tomdkat, about this, but what I'm saying is that on a title like Rounders, part of the subtitles are authored below the actual film image. The video sent from the player to the TV has the subtitle near the bottom of the 4:3 frame. When your TV crops the top and bottom to make the letterboxed image fill your screen, it WILL lose some of the subtitles.
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That's cool, but this is NOT the same as ISF calibration, which would probably result in as close to absolute maximum performance from your set that you could expect. I'm not knocking the Tweeter tech, but unless you go with an ISF tech you're not necessarly getting "the best".
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Maybe I'll get an ISF calibration down the road, but at this point I'm quite happy with the performance of my TV. I have it tweaked pretty well and don't feel the need to spend more to make it look better. I think it's pretty close to as good as it's getting right now. I may be wrong, but I'm happy with what I've got right now so no reason to do any more about it.