11 out of 11 people found this review helpful.
Excellent player with a few surprising features thrown in
Date of Review: May 7, 2006
The Bottom Line: This DVD player is well worth keeping in mind if you are in the market for a multi-DVD player. Be prepared for soemthing wide and deep though!
I got this DVD player as part of a home-theater package when I bought the Sony HT-7000DH home-theater system. My review of the DVD player here is going to repeat some of the points I made in my review of the home-theater system.
Essentially, this DVD player comes with a remote controller, a cheap A/V cable (yellow, white and red cables) and an 80-page manual. As is the case with most DVD players, setup was a snap. I hooked the DVD player with my new home-theater receiver using a coaxial cable and with my TV using an S-Video cable. The player is quite large front to back as well as side-to-side and barely fit into my entertainment center, but it is very light, giving it a flimsy feeling. The first time you switch on the DVD player, you go through a quick setup screen that allows you to set up things like audio and video output formats, OSD language, etc. After that, you are up and running.
This player can play DVD's, CD's, CD-R's, CD-RW's, DVD+R/W's, DVD-R/W's, JPEG CD's, VCD's, MP3 CD's etc. It can not play Photo CD's, DVD audio discs or the HD layer on SACD's. It can only play region 1 encoded DVD's and only plays NTSC movies (obviously, it can interface only with NTSC TV's).
Overall, it is a capable DVD player with good audio and video quality. It has S-video output, digital coaxial outputs as well as digital optical outputs, component video outputs and regular red, white and yellow lines out. The player also has an HDMI (high-definition multimedia interface) jack for high-definition output. The player is capable of sending signals at a resolution of upto 1920x1080i if you use the HDMI output.
The player has all the standard features of most other DVD players on the market such as a screen-saver, sound virtualization technology, dimmer for the display, black level settings, etc. You can change discs in other slots while a CD or DVD is playing in one of the slots (disc exchange). You can set the player up to shuffle play and/or repeat play a single track, one disc or all discs at once. You can also do fast forwards, fast reverses, chapter skips, stills, frame-by-frame advance, smooth slow motions etc.
The most interesting feature of the player that I like is a feature called fastplay and slowplay. Essentially, you can play a DVD faster or slower than normal speed without much perceptible change in the way the audio or video appears. I love this feature on my software DVD player (WinDVD 6) on my PC. The feature is not perfect on this DVD player (the software allows me to change the playback speed in 5% increments and I can set up a movie to play in a particular time or finish by a certain time, for example), but it is a start in the right direction. However the feature will not work under various circumstances including when the audio is DTS.
This player, like most on the market does not have many controls on the player itself. You can't operate the player efficiently without the remote. But, unlike some of the really cheap players, it has a display on the player that tells you basic information such as the disc being played, chapter, title, time etc.
Since I did not buy this DVD player separately, I am not sure how much it costs and so I am not going to be emphatic about its value. But this DVD player has most of what anyone could be looking for in a DVD player. If it could handle PAL and/or SECAM DVD's and had a better implementation of fastplay and slowplay, I would recommend it without any reservations. In the meantime, I will give it one and a half thumbs-up.
