Apex Digital 600A DVD Player

I purchased my APEX DVD player in June 2000. It has a sticker on the bottom that sets its manufacture date as January 2000 and it does not have the loopholes menu.

I must admit that my initial reason for looking at the AD-600A was the loopholes menu and the ability to play DVDs from around the world. I really enjoy watching movies from different cultures and with the characters interacting in different languages.

Lucky for all of us, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and India are distributing DVDs without region encoding. Just look for the globe logo with the word ?ALL? in the middle.

First Impressions
The price was as right as it could be. At $180 the AD-600A was the least expensive DVD player available from any retail outlet that I had access to at the time. Add in the fact that it has S-Video and Dolby ProLogic outputs, the ability to play CD-Rs full of MP3 files, and the chance that I may be able to play discs from other regions; this player was a sure thing for me.

Buttons, Buttons, and Yet More Buttons
The front of the player has 9 buttons on its face, and yet there are some buttons conspicuously absent. A ?Title, Digest, Root? button would be very appreciated. All of the buttons are the same size and shape. Worse yet, the labels for the buttons are screen-printed and are invisible in dim light.

The remote control has 38 buttons. That may seem like overkill, but it really is convenient to have direct access to so many features without the need to dig around in on-screen menus. Like the buttons on the player, the majority of the buttons on the remote are similar shapes and sizes. But the power button is a nice red and is located in a logical position of the upper left hand side and the eject button is located in the upper right.

The navigation buttons are set right in the center with easy to use oversized buttons and the ?Enter? button set in between. The remote definitely has a learning curve, but as long as you have a source of light handy you?ll appreciate its simplicity. Do not loose the remote control. Very few of the features are available without it.

Day-to-Day Use
After 17 years of owning a VCR, I have a total of 7 pre-recorded movies. After 2 months of owning a DVD player I have 13 DVD titles and I will own close to a hundred by the end of the year.

I have not experienced any of the problems I have read about while watching DVDs on the AD-600A. I have not seen any skipping or lip-sync errors while watching movies, or have I been unable to view extras or features from any of my DVDs. Fightclub, The Matrix, El Mariachi, SwordsmanII, and all of my other movies play without flaw.

There was one incident when I inserted ?Millionaire Express?, a regionless disc, the player did not immediately recognize it. But after ejecting and re-inserting it two more times, it worked fine. This has not happened since, with that title or any other.

I have the player plugged into a Mitsubishi TV with S-Video, which gives an incredibly sharp picture. With the TV set to maximum sharpness you can see all the glory of MPEG-2 compression artifacts. During movies like ?The Matrix? it can be really extreme, but I kind of like it. For me, it adds atmosphere to see the artifacts during a sci-fi movie.

For audio, I am using the Dolby Pro-Logic output to a Denon Pro-Logic bookshelf unit with 5 speakers. With this setup the sound is good, but not spectacular. It is much better than the sound from any of my Hi-Fi VHS machines.

I do not expect the useful life of this player to be more than 2 years, that?s just the way it is.

Playing MP3s
So far I have made one disc of 135 MP3 files using a Imoega ZipCD burner and its bundled Adaptec EasyCD software. The APEX is able to play this disc flawlessly. It truncates the filenames to 8 characters with the last characters being used to differentiate multiple files with the same first 8 letters.

Playing MP3s is very rudimentary and not very well thought out, but if you like to listen to every song ?Dead Can Dance? has released without swapping CDs or waiting for your jukebox to load the next disc, then this is a great feature for you.

What It Wont Do
The AD-600A does not have Coax outputs, so if you have an older TV, VCR, or other box, you may not be able to use this DVD player. There are many ways around this though. By using the RCA video and audio out into a VCR then from the VCR to your TV via Coax, you will be able to enjoy your movies, but at a less than optimal quality.

It does have an RCA type PCM/Dolby Digital audio out but does not include a ?Fiber Optic? output. So if that is something you require, you?ll need to look elsewhere.

The remote control is not of the universal variety. It only controls the DVD player and is not programmable to control other devices.

In Conclusion
For a straightforward DVD player the APEX AD-600A does everything I currently require of a DVD player with the added bonus of playing CD-R discs with hours and hours of MY music.