Apex Digital AD-800 DVD Player

This is my second Apex player and also my second progressive scan player. This player replaced a Toshiba 5109. That's right. What is known as the king of the hill in affordable P.S. DVD players is being replaced with an Apex.
I should mention that the Toshiba died after 5 or 6 months of use also. Thus the reason its being replaced. And this is one great replacement. I wasn't very happy about the idea of shelling out another $400.00 to $600.00 for a progressive scan player so I was going to do research on a standard player to tie me over for a year or so. That's when I ran across the Apex. Now my last Apex wasn't bad, it just started having problems with some movies. Like ID4 and Terminator 2. But the reviews on this one seemed ok. And more research gave the progressive output a clean bill of health also by stating that it did have a 3:2 pull down of film material. So I thought I would give it a try.

The features:
VCD / SVCD. There's nothing like watching VCD's on the big screen. and like most VCD's they are normally made at home and burned to a CDR. While most DVD players will VCD's the majority of them will not read CDR's and even fewer of them can handle SVCD (which looks great). My Toshiba which is supposed to be able to play VCD would often choke on professionally made and pressed cd's, which it should not have a problem with. The Apex will play anything with no problem. Matter of fact if you put a cd in that is not in the correct format it will still display a directory structure.

MP3
While this is something that I may not use alot. I can see it being very handy from time to time. Out of a cd full of MP3's it only had a problem with 2 songs. I've not taken a look yet at the bit rate for these songs or anything else that makes them different from the others. But that's not bad. And with a 32 character display full song titles can be displayed. The only drawback that I've found with this feature is there's no quick way of scrolling through songs. So if you have a few hundred songs in the root directory then you'll have to hit the down arrow a few hundred times to get to the last song. However the player will recognize sub directories, so you can plan accordingly.

DVD's:
This player produced a stunning picture on my Toshiba TN61X81 HD ready set. The picture was noticeably better then the previous Toshiba 5109 progressive scan player that was connected to it. I actually pulled out movies that I've watched before just to see how much better they looked on the Apex player. Setup of the player was a snap and there's lots of things in the setup for people to tweek, including gamma correction, color saturation, dynamic range, ect.

Now for the con:
The only fault that I found with this player is the remote and the way it will do a fast forward or rewind. There's no ff or rw buttons on the remote! There's a jog knob on the player but in order to fast forward you have use the direction buttons. But wait, it gets even dumber then that! You have to hit a toggle button to switch between navigation mode and speed mode for the direction buttons. Then you press the *down arrow* to cycle through the slow forward speeds (-2X,-4X,-20X) then you keep hitting the button to go through the fast forward speeds. You press the up arrow key to toggle through the same sequence to go back. If that wasn't bad enough the player is slow in responding when in these modes. So you will most likely never be very near the mark your trying to hit when speeding forward or back. Maybe there will be enough of an outcry from the public to make them come out with a fix since this player can be upgraded via firmware.

In conclusion:
If it wasn't for the horrible mistake that was made with the remote I would have given this player 5 stars. Everything else with the player is more then fine and I consider it one of the best players I've ever owned (and I've been through 2 Toshibas, 1 Panasonic, another Apex and have tried half a dozen more in my house before taking them back). I'm very quick to consider something junk and will require something to prove that its not junk before singing my praises about it. And while normally the remote issue would be cause enough for me to haul any machine back to the store for a different model the other features are just so great that I'll adapt. I highly recommend this player for anyone with the television that can handle it.

PS:
I should also mention that this player has a standard IDE interface type DVD-Rom drive in it. Which is one reason it doesn't have problems with recorded media. One of the bright points in this is if the drive happens to die, just buy another instead of an entire DVD player.
Also I read a couple of reports about the heat that is generated from the unit. I have one of the new models and it runs pretty cool. Not as cool as lets say my Panasonic A110 but much cooler then the now dead Toshiba 5109.