Apex Digital AD-800 DVD Player

The Apex AD-800 seems like a good deal. For $179 you get rare features like VCD, SVCD playback, CD-R, CD-RW, good MP3 playback, progressive scan...

The price is great, the feature content also. However there are two issues here. The firs one is the fact that the player is not easy to use and has difficult-to-navigate menu system.

Pictrure Quality And Progressive Scan

The second issue is the picture quality in general and in progressive mode in particular. The picture in general is very soft with poor visibility of small detail. The video ringing is also visible.

At least there is no chroma upsampling errors (this player uses Mediamatics MPEG decoder), unlike Sony 700P or Apex AD600. But the player has no motion-adaptive deinterlacing...

MP3

The player shows up to 32 characters of the file name and shows the file names on the screen. This is much better than some players that do not show file name at all and others that show only 8 characters.

The player also plays CD-R and CD-RW. The 29-bit HDCD is also present. The player has zoom at 2x and 4x, Karaoke with 2 microphone jacks.

VCD And SVCD

Majority of DVD players can play VCD, but ability to play Super VCD is a rare feature. The picture quality of SVCD is far superior to VCD (which are quite poor at 352x240 resolution and MPEG-1 artifacts) and the disc fits movies of larger length.

The player also plays PAL discs (including Region 1 PAL DVDs), converting them to NTSC!

Overall

The AD-800 has a lot of feature content for the low price. If these are important to you, the AD-800 can be a good choice. However, if you want better picture quality and better progressive scan, there ar other DVD players that provide it for not much more money. Unfortunately, they cannot match this Apex's versatility.