Our DVD player, an old Panasonic A160 from 1999, is dying. It has always had a habit of intermittently refusing to play discs for no apparent reason, but it is now rejecting more discs than it is willing to play. And the usual trick of eject/reinsert no longer works. Very annoying, and using the PS2 as a fallback player is less than satisfactory.
So, any suggestions for a replacement? Our requirements are modest:
- It must be multi-region, with built-in NTSC to PAL conversion. (Our TV doesn’t handle NTSC signals)
- Quieter than a PS2. (Shouldn’t be hard)
- Cheap (sub-£100).
We don’t care about surround sound and home cinema hookups right now. Our living room isn’t set up for extensive speaker setups, and that’s not going to change any time soon. We don’t care about fancy features like zoom, picture-in-picture, or bookmarking. Amazon has several players in the price range I am thinking of (£30-£40). Does anyone know if they’re any good? (Although at that price, it’s pretty hard to go wrong.)
Martin,my DVD player also died exactly a year ago and my search criteria have always been the same as yours. I was very surprised to find exactly what I needed at the price of 70$ CAD (50$ US). A Philips 727 DVD Player, progressive scan, zone free. Perfect sound and image and 1 year later works as new.
I have many DVDs from France that I play everyday and the built in conversion works like a charm. I think they came out with other models since then, but here is for example a detailed description :
http://www.welectronics.com/dvd/pioneer/PHILIPS724DVD.SHTML
Don’t be lured by the price, I am sure you can find it at half price. Best users’s choice apparently!
DVD/video standards are changing very rapidly, so you might want to think about having a look at where the market is going. You should consider the possibility that over the next few years, the interconnects are going to be digital, and think about buying equipment that supports digital connections as well as analogue. There’s a lot of good info at http://www.avsforum.com
If want something a little more future-proof, but a little more pricy, try the Yamakawa 365 and 375. (We got the 365.) It does all the region-free stuff, plus it’ll play DIVX, but it’s got a DVI output, and will upconvert to 720p over Scart and DVI. Build quality’s pretty crap, but picture quality is superb.
Germany’s the best place to order from. Try http://www.technikdirekt.de, or http://www.computeruniverse.net.
But if you’re not too bothered, buy something cheap and cheerful. You’ll probably replace it in a couple of years anyhow… 😉
Thanks for the suggestions–I’ll scope them out a little further later today.
Dave – normally I’d be all over the future-proofing, and making sure that whatever I bought was going to last more than a couple of years. Right now, though, our TV is probably the limiting factor on our (well, my) home cinema ambitions, and we don’t have any plans to buy a new one any time soon. Buying a sophisticated DVD player with nothing to plug it in to would only make me pine for even more AV equipment. Pining leads to spending. And spending leads to the Dark Side.
I’m happy enough to lay down £40 for a low-end throw-away player now, and replace it when I can afford a high-definition projector…and a new house with a dedicated media room to put it in. 🙂
…and a new wife to let you have the media room (or a dedicated bindery to keep her from noticing that you have one).
I’m right behind you on the media room Martin!
The Toshiba SD330E was about to get a mention, my parents and brother both own one and they work fantastically, plus they are next to nothing.
I would agree with Dave and suggest AVForums looking for posts about people who are looking to buy cheap and see what they say about quality and what answers they have received.
Mmmm… after a bit of looking around, the £35 Yakumo XL2 is top of my list right now. Cheap and cheerful. It would be so easy to spend more, but I really don’t need any more features than this one already has.
The pound sign in this article breaks your RSS feed. See http://feedvalidator.org/check?url=http://www.sunpig.com/martin/index.rss
We went for the Yakuma in the end. It arrived on Thursday, and so far it’s performing nicely. The remote control is a bit fiddly when you don’t point it exactly at the player, and there have been a few times where a DVD has stuttered in mid-play, but for a mere 35 smackeroos I’m quite willing to forgive that. Especially as the picture quality is lovely now that we’ve got it set up right.
(Also: pound sign fixed now. I keep forgetting to encode them manually. I need to get around to properly understanding character encodings some day…)