Apex Digital 600A DVD Player

I bought one of these players for the obvious reason; I heard about the secret menu and I wanted to have it. I found that it does indeed do what I wanted. I also thought that the fact that it plays MP3 files was interesting as well. But I have since experienced some strange results with my player that I wanted to share with the community.

On certain DVDs I have experienced reproducible issues where the player doesn't handle the animation-type menus. Two examples would be the wide screen version of Stuart Little and Bats. In Stuart Little for example I was unable to select any of the features. Any attempt to run a feature made the player reload the menu animation from the beginning. Bats had a similar problem. I had to disable the advanced features of the player and just have it auto-play to watch the DVDs I have this problem with. The same DVDs play just fine in my Pioneer DVD player. On one DVD I was unable to get it to work at all (The Slipper and the Rose). I also tested the player with a DVD I knew worked immediately when I experienced these problems, so I know it wasn't a problem with the settings.

Now this may have been made worse by what I call the heat problem. I have taken to turning my Apex off when not in use instead of leaving it in standby. The place where I have it is well ventilated and the player gets very hot even just in standby. This seems to affect the performance.

Having said all this I love the player for the things it does that my Pioneer player won't do; play DVDs from all regions, play MP3s, and let me choose to use or not use Macrovision and CSS.

So I recommend this as a secondary player and for an MP3 component for your theater system. I would be hesitant to recommend this as someone's primary player because of the strange problems experienced with menu animations.

I wrote this epinion to present the issues that I had experienced with the player that were strange. There are already several reviews in existence that give a good technical review of the system and I did not feel that a rehashing of these facts was necessary. I did want to present issues that I did not see being presented though. So, I apologize for the lack of detailed technical data but that was not the intent of this epinion.