Let’s get the bad news out of the way first. This DVD player/recorder doesn’t have a TV tuner. And Toshiba’s website says an “external tuner source [is] required to record television programming.” So what are you going to record? Well, it does have a DV port for your camcorder, so we guess you can record DVDs of your own movies. Satisfying as that exercise will no doubt be, it’s hard to figure how this player’s “commercial skip” feature is going to help you watch your own home movies—which, if you’re anything like us, are not sponsored in part by Gold Bond Medicated Powder or anyone else.

So that’s kind of weird.

But here’s the good news. Its video upconversion capability will help ease your transition into a higher-definition world. One day, all your media will be Super-Duper-Eye-Dazzling-High-Def-So-Real-You’ll-Poop-Your-Pants, and all your media-playing hardware will display in SDEDHDSRYPYP, too. That’s going to be awesome, as we all agree, except for the omnipresent stench of everybody’s soiled pants.

But until then, your lower-res movies are starting to look a little bit sub-excellent on your series of ever-higher-definition screens. Upconversion gives them a little boost.

You know what it’s like? It’s like how, in the movie biz, CGI is still not at the point where a computer-animated prairie dog looks real. But there are going to be times when the script calls for stuff that even the best-trained real, live prairie dogs can’t do. And prairie dog puppets have their own obvious limitations.

So what you want to do, see, is take your trained prairie dogs and your prairie dog puppets, and digitally upconvert them. They’ve still got real-looking fur and body movements, but maybe you can make them move at the right time, or wink at the camera, or whatever.

Actually, this is not a very apt analogy. Sorry. We’ve just been thinking a lot about those stupid digital prairie dogs. Seriously, one just pops up in the very first shot. That’s to tell us “don’t worry! This movie is not going to be very good!”

This Toshiba has some other nice features, by the way, but now we’re all ticked off about those crummy prairie dogs, so just check the listed specs.

Ugh, and the monkeys! Don’t get us started on the freaking monkeys.

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