Great DVD for kids and parents alike

Of course the first thing I did, when looking for a new portable DVD to make long trips in the car just a little more bearable, was to go to epinions and see what players people had reviewed. Well, after 2 weeks of researching them I eventually had a few I wanted to see in the stores. I went to all the big box stores (Walmart, Target, Circuit City, BestBuy, etc) and finally after comparing them in person, knew the Sony DVP-FX810 was what we wanted. One final indicator for the likelyhood that this was a good unit to buy was the fact that they were sold out almost everywhere I looked to try and see one in person.....no wonder, I bought one as soon as I saw it too.

Let me start off with the fact that the main reason we bought this DVD was for our 2 yr old son who has been patiently sitting in a carseat for 7-8 hr car trips to see family, but as he gets older, the attention span seems to be getting shorter. The sure fire way to keep him occupied for at least part of the way is to play his favorite movie of the day....right now it's Shrek, but who knows next week. Anyway, I burn copies of all our DVD collection since my son also likes to put the DVDs in himself and they are often destroyed quickly from scratches....easy enough, just burn another copy and away we go on the next trip. I burn them in DVD +R which seems to be a tough format to support, I'll go into that a bit later. The other main feature I was looking for was the swivel screen because I had a friend who's kid destroyed a cheaper player during a temper tantrum in the carseat because the type that opens 180 degrees was within reach of the kid's feet. I didn't think it was a "must have" feature, but it was high on my wish list anyway. I also wanted it to have a fairly good battery life and another wish list item was not to have a bulky battery hanging off the back of the player so it can be stuffed into a purse on airplane rides. Upon arrival I'd also like to have the unit function as a regular DVD I can hook up to the TV with RCA outputs since the hotel rooms and grandparent's houses don't seem to come equipped to play DVDs there either. Video/sound inputs are also a must have because I am sure my son will soon want to plug in a PSP when he figures out how fun video games can be too.

When I first started looking at portable DVDs there were a few which stood out and those were the Philips PET1002/37, Philips PET724/37, Sony DVP-FX810, Sony D-VE7000S and the Panasonic DVD-LS91. So I'll give a little for why I didn't buy each of them and then go onto the Sony's features. I did use to work in the display industry at one time so I will give my take on each from that angle as well. I did find that 99% of the units out there now are using the widescreen QVGA (1/4 VGA) or WQVGA resolution as standard (more on that below). I will say it is sad that a portable DVD today is not getting a better screen resolution in a smaller package (I often had a tough time finding what the actual resolution was for some of them since many manufacturers seem to keep that a secret, thus obviously making it tougher for the consumer to compare units) but it is what it is (lower resolution does also tend to keep the cost of manufacturing down though and that is a positive in the end for us as a consumer).

Philips PET1002/37, Philips PET724/37:
They both have very nice screens, the 1002 is a 10.2" screen and is the only one I looked at that uses widescreen VGA or WVGA resoultion which is 800 x 480 (also why you see many reviews saying what a nice looking screen it has and that it shows more detail than the others....more pixels, better picture, very simple). The 724 has a 7" screen with WQVGA which is 480 x 234 resolution (very common and used on everything from PDAs to the Sony PSP and even some cell phones now). Both screens have an anti-glare coating on the surface of them so that is not an issue and both seem to support the most DVD formats of any player DVD, DVD-R/RW, DVD R/RW, (S)VCD, DivX, MPEG4 movies, CD, CD-RW, and MP3/WMA-CD (so if DIVX or VCD is what you're into, these Philips units might be a good choice). They both have video/sound inputs/outputs, dual headphone jacks and coax digital sound outputs as well. Both units also have cool modern styling (smooth lines, brushed aluminum buttons), remeniscent of an iPod but they are fairly bulky especially with the battery attached (although the 724 boasts 4 hr battery time while the 1002 is right around 3 hrs max). Combine that with no swivel screen and I had to pass on both of them (The 1002 retailed for about $299 and the 724 was about $129 during my quest for info).

Sony D-VE7000S:
This new Sony unit is very slick and seems to be the eventual direction of units you'll see emerge in future years (although instead of DVDs you'll carry hard drives of increasing capacities....like large video iPods). The 7000S is a one piece design so it basically stays in tablet mode at all times (which is good when in use, but bad when you throw it in a purse....I'd imagine the screen gets scratched pretty quickly if you didn't us a "cut to fit" protector like the fellows makes for PDAs which will reduce the brightness and may shift screen colors a bit too). It did have video/sound in/out and twin headphone jacks. The 7" screen was WQVGA 480 x 234 and seems to be resonably bright but side-by-side not as good as the FX810 did (it will have some glare like the FX810 due to a lack of anti-glare surface treatment but there are tradeoffs I'll mention later). Sony claims to support DVD, DVD-R/-R DL/-RW, DVD R/ R DL/ RW, JPEG, MP3, CD, CD-R and CD-RW but someone claimed in a review it didn't support burned DVDs (I didn't check more into this since it failed my criteria for other reasons). It also has only 3 hrs of battery life vs the FX810 which boasts 6 or so. A big issue was that there were no external speakers at all (understandable for a walkman, but my son doesn't like to wear headphones much). It does have a charger/base with speakers so that won't work for us on a car trip. Finally with a price roughly $199 (same as the FX810) I passed on this one as well.

Panasonic DVD-LS91:
One of the first things that catches your eye with this unit is the way the clamshell works. It has the ability to go into both clamshell and tablet mode with no swivel mechanism which is pretty slick since the swivels can become damaged more easily but there is a bit of bulk added to the LS91 to make this happen. The Panasonic also boasts the second largest screen (at 9") of the bunch, but the issue is that the resolution is essentially no different than the 7" Philips 724 and the 7" Sony 7000S or the 8" FX810 so it actually looked the worst to me. The brightness and colors are good, but the screen's "graininess" was just intolerable even at a distance. The Panasonic claims to handle DVD, DVD-RAM, DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD-R DL, DVD +R, DVD+RW, DVD +R DL, CD, CD-R, CD-RW, WMA, MP3 and JPEG formats but I didn't test these at all. The unit was stylish overall, but the all silver look is a bit much. The battery is quite compact like the FX810 and sits very flat against the body of the DVD player which is a plus and claims similar run times of about 6 hrs. The unit does come with Audio/Video outputs (couldn't tell if it had inputs or not) and dual headphone jacks. Overall it was not nearly impressive enough to make me fork over the $300 they wanted for it, so I passed.

Finally what you've all been waiting for.....

Sony DVP-FX810:
Form Factor
The best DVD player I found on the market right now was by far the Sony DVP-FX810. The form factor and functionality were great (I bought it at Circuit City and had it working before I left the parking lot strapped to the headrest with a nylon belt to hold it temporarily until we got to our destination). The swivel screen is great and transforms easily from clamshell to tablet and back again. You do have to be a bit careful with this design because the swivel only turns one way, forcing it the opposite direction will break the hinge (Sony's PDAs like the PEG-NR70V suffered greatly from this weakness). I just set it up and then tell the kids not to touch it without me, so this is not an issue for me. The player itself measures about 8.9" long x 6.3" wide x 1.3" thick and weighs about 2.2 lbs (a bit heavy when you first pick it up but well worth it for the battery life).

Screen
The 8" screen looked great in WQVGA (actually slightly less at a resolution of 480 x 220 and personally I would have expected better from Sony, but the result is still very good in comparison to others in the same category) and you can see some pixelation ("graininess" or lack of sharp lines) and a tiny bit of screen door effect (space between pixels) if you look hard. I did read a few reviews that mention that glare was an issue with this unit and I was expecting the worst but I must say it isn't as bad as I thought. The other benefit for not adding anti-glare treatment to the surface is that it not only brightens screen contrast/colors, but also increases battery life since you don't need to crank up the brightness as high as you would otherwise.

Audio and Video IO
This unit also has a built in Dolby Digital Decoder and 2 channel Virtual Stereo output. The speakers on the FX810 are more than adequate at full volume and there are 2 headphone jacks common on most DVD players now. There is a composite A/V jack with a switch to change from input to output (very slick). There is also an S-video output which is a great addition for a portable like this.

Buttons, Menus and Remote
The play (pause, play, stop, FWD, REW) and menu (menu, display, LCD mode, return and select) buttons on the front are well layed out and easy to access while in use (tablet and clamshell modes). The "LCD mode" is especially helpful if your movie is 4:3 TV format instead of 16:9 widescreen which allows you to stretch it to fullscreen to remove the side banding (will deform picture a bit but still very watchable). DVDs shot in widescreen format play perfectly fullscreen with no deformation (although I will mention I found some Disney DVDs like "Lady and the Tramp" have a super wide or "original movie theater" widescreen format that will show bars at the top and bottom since it has a ratio of 2.55:1). It is also a good thing to keep in mind that 4:3 (Fullscreen) format will have a ratio of about 1.33:1 and 16:9 (Widescreen) format will be roughly 1.77:1 so if they are too far from the ratio needed to do the Widescreen format, you will have black areas (for some reason, in Widescreen the stretch option is not available to select on the menu, but in Fullscreen, it is). It usually will say the ratio for a movie on the back of a DVD case and it seems like the player can slightly compensate and fill the screen completely if the ratio is not too far above (2.55:1 is obviously too much). A more advanced zoom feature would have been nice to mitigate this banding a bit, but no such luck on this model. The "display" button is nothing special and shows the stats on the DVD but can be helpful to use to shut off subtitles if the get turned on accidentally. The "menu" button is helpful for accessing DVD setup functions and this is great if you don't have the remote handy. The remote is a bit large for the fact it is a portable DVD and it could have been smaller, but again not a big deal for what I use it for.

Formats Played
The FX810 supports DVD, DVD +R DL, DVD +R/RW, DVD-R/RW, CD, CD-R/RW, MP3 and JPEG format files and since I am just making copies of my DVDs, other formats like DIVX are not an issue for me. The most commonly supported format you can burn on DVD is DVD -R (players like Toshiba and a few others will not play DVD +R format so be careful) thus I was quite happy to find that the FX810 did play my DVD +R's (I tried it on the display model before I bought....that would have been a dealbeaker for me no doubt).

Battery
One of the most outstanding features of the FX810 is definately the super low profile lithium ion battery (rivaled only by the Panasonic LS91 and to a smaller extent the 7000S with similar technology, but smaller capacity). Sony and Panasonic both sport low profile battery technology because they are one of the few lithium ion battery manufacturers out there (both make them for PDAs, laptops, etc) and are made in their own factories vs other makers which need to engineer units from standard parts to keep prices down. This was really one of the big selling features to me even though I have not run the battery all the way down (since in the car we use the car charger cable, but I am sure it will at least go 4.5 to 5 hrs between full charges).

Hopefully this will save others a bit of time doing the same research I did before I bought. I will say that the future units will replace the DVD with a hard drive or may even have both but they are so new right now you end up paying an arm and a leg for being able to ride the front of the wave. If you really want true to life, super detailed displays, then you should be looking at a laptop or notebook PC instead of a dedicated portable DVD player (I even saw some DVD capable laptops in the $400 range after rebates, but none of these would last through my son's usage). Overall I am very pleased with my purchase and would definately recommend the Sony DVP-FX810 to anyone.