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This topic comprises 5 pages: 1 2 3 4 5
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Author
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Topic: Cheap DVD Players - Be Careful Buying One
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 12-15-2007 08:00 PM
I had a nice little adventure today. I had to buy a DVD player to replace the $250 Pioneer 5-disc carousel DVD player I purchased back in 2001, which replaced the $400 Sony DVD player I purchased in 1999.
My Pioneer DVD player picked a fine time to die on me. I'm probably going to get a dual format Blu-Ray/HD-DVD player in just a few months to go with the HDTV setup I'm going to be buying fairly soon. Any new DVD player purchase at this point just seems like a waste of money.
So, I naturally wanted to save some money on this replacement DVD player purchase.
There's quite a few DVD players available in stores for really low prices. Many of these players are from reputable brand names. And these cheap DVD players have some pretty interesting features. But they're also dropping out a lot of features too.
Wal-Mart was the first place I visited. They had the Phillips DVP 3960 DVD player on sale for just $39. I took a quick look at the back panel. No optical audio output, but coaxial instead. That'll work. So I took one home. My mistake. Didn't look hard enough. This player didn't have S-Video output. HDMI output is great, but I don't have a HDTV set yet or even a receiver that can handle HDMI sources either. Wal-Mart gave me a refund.
I went to Sears. They also had the $39 Phillips DVD player and several other cheap DVD players (including one for only $24). Many lacked S-Video and optical audio outputs.
Then I saw an interesting DVD player from RCA, the DRC285 model. This one had all the outputs I needed. It played lots of different kinds of media. It even had a USB 2.0 jack on the front panel for connection with digital cameras and computers. Pretty neat for $59. I bought one and took it home.
Thankfully, I was smart enough to read through the user manual for the RCA DRC285 DVD player before unpacking the player itself. In reading through the details of setting up the player for different audio formats I discovered something disturbing: this fucker doesn't support DTS output! WTF!?
I taped up the RCA DVD player box and got ready to take it back to Sears. While carrying the DVD player to my truck I realized I had no truck keys. And I realized I had just locked myself out of my house. Arrgh!
![[Mad]](mad.gif)
10 minutes later, after breaking into my own house using a secret trick I will not describe, I was back at Sears getting a refund on the RCA player and looking more carefully at the others.
None of the remaining DVD players were perfect, but the one that fit the bill best pissed me off for the brand name: Sony.
I have not forgotten the anger and frustration I experienced with my first DVD player, a Sony DVP-S530D. It worked great the first year. Then it started developing the dreaded Sony lip sync error. Then the damned thing started freezing up on various discs. Criterion's version of The Rock would lock up that player at the layer change. You couldn't even turn off the power. The plug had to be pulled out of the socket! It was that bad.
So I'm looking hard at the Sony DVP-NS77H. $99. Little more expensive than the other single disc DVD players. I really wanted to like the $79 Samsung DVD player nearby. But in comparing "forward looking" features, the Sony unit won out.
The deciding factor was the HDMI output. The Samsung DVD player upscaled to 720p or 1080i. The Sony upscales to 1080p. On top of that, it has some unique "Bravia Theater Sync" feature that gives it some advantages with Sony's Bravia line of HDTVs. Right now, the most likely HDTV I'm going to buy is Sony's 52" XBR4 Bravia model.
Anyway, I brought the player home and got it hooked up with my Yamaha receiver. The player works well. Nothing to complain about on picture quality. My only complaint is that it's a bit on the slow side in loading movies and taking commands from the remote. But I can live with that for several months until I move up to Blu-Ray and HD-DVD.
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Michael Barry
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 584
From: Sydney, NSW, Australia
Registered: Nov 1999
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posted 12-15-2007 09:38 PM
I hear you. It seems that the manufacturers of regular (SD) DVD players have pretty much given up trying to offer quality. Pioneer and Sony (perhaps Panasonic) are still making units that are sort of adequate, but nowhere near the level of quality they were when DVD was a newer format.
Of course, they are no longer $400 either, so this part is understandable. Likewise, one expects prices on consumer electronics to drop over time, and basic economics dictates that there's going to be a price/quality quotient at work.
The problem comes when the customer is willing to pay a little more to obtain a quality DVD player: they will discover that this area of the market is no longer being catered for. Yes, companies like Denon offer no-compromise decks, but these sell at prices that are comparable to HD decks, making their existence somewhat irrelevant. So it boils down to uber-cheap or uber-expensive with nothing in between.
I find it surreal that DVD players are now selling for prices like $39. To me, there's something weird about that idea, especially when that's the same amount of money that 2 CDs would cost. There's something profoundly out of whack about this! It could be argued that CDs are too expensive, but for the life of me I cannot understand how or why DVD players became this cheap or why they needed to. After all, VHS was a huge success without dropping the price of decks to this level, so why was it necessary to go this low?
Also, you know things have gone too far when features such as s-video output and DTS have been dropped - crazy!
It's interesting that you mentioned the DVP-S530D. I had (note the past-tense) two of these in my video store. Yes, I also experienced the complete lock-up that could only be resolved by pulling the A/C plug! Also, it did have some firmware issues: it would not even load 'Into The Blue' at all (ironically, a Sony title!) or would choke on various other discs.
Both machines were in constant use between 10am and 11pm 7 days a week. Interestingly, one of them lasted more than twice as long as the other. The one that went the distance would repeat play the same disc - sometimes for days - before changing the movie. When this machine eventually died and had to be replaced, I went into the service menu and looked at the number of laser hours: the machine had clocked up 17,000 hours on the laser! This is highly unusual and I chalk it up to being a freak incident. There's no way that the average consumer player would last that long (and the other one certainly didn't). One of them has been replaced with a Pioneer, the other with a Sony. These will do until I upgrade them to HD.
I hope that HD players don't get to the point that one cannot buy a quality player even if one wants to. I grossly dislike the idea of a society where the only thing that's important is to be able to pay the lowest possible price for everything. Don't get me wrong, competition in business is healthy and necessary, but I wish that more people would focus on quality rather than just price, so that the competition would be on overall value for money rather than just cutting prices to the bone. The latter just creates a vicious circle which can only lead in one direction...and it isn't pretty.
My hope is that people will start to make the connection between price, quality and service and how you cannot have all three at once, and that people will understand that a society based only on being tight with money really isn't healthy or sustainable.
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Dennis Benjamin
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1445
From: Denton, MD
Registered: Feb 2002
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posted 12-16-2007 01:57 PM
I own a Philips DVP-3960. I discussed this player over in the other thread (HD-DVD, BLU-RAY) over in the afterlife. The main reason this player works well for me is the following:
• DivX Ultra Home Theater Certified
DivX is video compression software which enables high quality video to be compressed into very small files then downloaded onto CD-R or CD-RW and played back with very little loss of quality.
• Multi-Format Player
Don't worry about limited playback capabilities, the DVP-3960 plays DVD-Audio/Video, DVD-R/W, DVD+R/W, CD, CD-R/W, SVCD, DivX, MP3, WMA-CD and JPEG.
Most of Philips DVD players have the DivX. All my video files that I deal with on the home front (family videos, home movies, etc.) are done in DivX.
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