Apex Digital 600A DVD Player

Before I start, a DVD is a "Digital Versatile Disc", which plays movies

People I know always notice something about me. I Love movies. I can't live without them. I examine movies with extreme detail and love them for the smallest reason. So it's obvious I need to have an excellent way to view my movies correct?

Of Course

So a year ago for a present I received probably the best gift anyone could have given me at the time. An Apex-AD-600 DVD Player, along with The Matrix. How cool is that? It's VERY cool. So anyway, I got my DVD player and I already had many discs to play on it because being how I love movies, I bought some to play on my DVD-ROM on my computer. My brother had a DVD player so I got to see all the features and gimmicks that came with it. His was a Sony and when I pulled out an APEX, I admit, I was a bit disappointed for it not being a flashy new brand like Sony or Panasonic. Oh well, any DVD player is better than no DVD player right?

Well, all my worries and dumb complaints about it not being a big brand were put to rest. I lugged it out of its box and read over the details. I was surprised to see everything it had. I knew only certain DVD players had certain features but this one had quite a few. Some of them including Karaoke, Mp3 Playback, DTS, 5.1 Surround Sound. All of them, VERY sweet. =)

The Goods
It's a very nice player I must say. It's got all the nice features you would want. 2x, 4x, 6x for fast forwarding, it's a very nifty feature for when you want to find a very exact spot in a film. The Step button helps much too. It progresses the film at a frame a second. Helps even more so to help find things. For instance, on the DVD for Romeo Must Die I stopped the film on a frame using the Step button. I was able to see the hidden wires used for the fight scene at the end. Without the Step feature, I'd never be able to see that!

Among those cool features, there's also a nice playback feature where to can select a portion of a DVD you want to view over and over again. So for instance, say you love a snippet of an action scene, simply enter in where you want the scene to begin and end, all with a simple click of a button and Voila! Your scene will repeat for you until you want it to stop.

The basic Play, Rewind, FF, Pause features are all here too. They don't skip a beat. Chapter forwarding and rewinds are never flawed.

Mp3 Playing on the player is one of the best features I could of asked for. Being a net junkie and having a high-speed connection, I naturally have over 1000 Mp3s on my hard drive. I copied around 200 Songs onto a disc of mine and slapped it in my player. I found two errors. 1) For some reason for whence I have no idea, some songs would not show up, and 2) the song titles were messed up. Here's what I mean.

Say I had a song by Third Eye Blind labeled "Third Eye Blind - Jumper", the title on the DVD player would come out like TEBJMP. Try deciphering that song out of my 100+ songs on the disc and you have a problem. So I went back, renamed all of my songs (Tedious I must say) and they got a little more recognizable. The songs play better than I could ever imagine. Since the DVD player can have the power for output with 5.1 Sound you can hook up multiple speakers and turn your room into the hippest music scene in the world!

I haven't tried out the Karaoke yet, that's probably a good thing. A cousin of mine has the same player and used it for a party, he said it worked without any qualms or problems.

For only $160, this player is a lot cheaper than most DVD players on the market are. Making it a fine buy for anyone, rich or poor.

Picture Quality and Sound are all on key. There were only minimal distortions when I viewed The Matrix but it didn't happen on any other DVD. The sound was never off on any of my DVDs. I experienced no problems there. All in all, it held up over everything I threw at it.

The Bad Stuff
I have one major complaint about this DVD player. I am a fan of anime and I imported a DVD that fit with the player's region code (1), and I played it. The animation was as crisp as ever but I noticed that the voices were completely off in every way. It's a very annoying thing to view anime with the sound/music being off.

The remote and interface on the DVD player are just pure jokes. The interface has merely 6 buttons that will hardly help you and the DVD remote is far too small and lanky to be of any use. The labeling on the buttons have been worn off already so I forgot what they do now!

Apart from these things, it's a fine player.

Goodies!
There's a hidden menu on the player that allows you to do many things. Among these things are removing the Region Coding, recording the footage onto tapes, and removing CSS coding. It's a very useful tool for junkies. Here's for you can access the menu...


You turn the drive on, without any discs in the drawer. Hit SETUP on the remote, then move the cursor over the menu option PREFERENCES. Now for the trick... hit STEP, Skip backwards, Skip forwards, and ta-da, secret menu appears, reminding you that YOU SHOULD NOT BE HERE!
Thanks to ign.com for the info

Only players that were made after 9/99 will be able to play Mp3s and have the hidden menu.

Overall
It's a fine DVD player. The picture and sound are great except for a few minor problems and the hidden menu just helps to bring up its value. It's a good beginner's DVD player. It has everything a viewer would need and a little more. A very worthy buy.

Happy Viewing!
~Kenshin-Guy