Apex Digital AD-2100 DVD Player

I would not recommend the Apex AD-2100 DVD player. I purchased it because it was fairly inexpensive and played many formats, including WMA and JPEG. Although I would much rather have an Ogg Vorbis compatible player, as far as I know there are none yet so I thought WMA would be a way of getting more songs on a CD than MP3 allows.

It turned out not to be much of a bargain. While the player does play all those formats, the quality of the design and construction is very low. The menus are very poorly designed, almost impossible to navigate, and some of the features, such as photo thumbnails don't work. The plastic used for the case is so cheap that I made a huge scratch just by placing my TV on top of it. My Panasonic VCR has sat under my TV for 10 years and there are no such scratches on it. The remote control also feels very cheap, like there's nothing in it. Basically, this is a product produced by some cheap Asian company that just wanted to get a product out the door as fast as possible while being able to advertise a long list of features, so that they could sell it to price conscious consumers looking for a lot of features. Well, they got me, but don't let them get you!

You don't even save that much money by buying this player compared to a reputable brand, some of which have the same features. Also, this player doesn't have TOSlink optical digital out and it isn't progressive scan. While I don't need those features for use with my dinky TV and neither do many other people, they will soon be standard on every DVD player so you might as well get a player that will support the full range of standards. It's not that much more money. Good luck!