MAJOR REVISIONS THROUGHOUT, 8/14/03 -

I purchased this player solely because of it's VGA output connector. I was looking at a decent software-based player for my PC (I want my Mac back!) and found what seem to be the top two, WinDVD and PowerDVD. The funny thing is that these programs cost around $50, where a few dollars more would get me the superior picture quality of a progressive scan hardware unit.

Though there were other units with VGA output on them (Daewoo and RJ Tech each make one), this one was the cheapest (from overstock.com) at $63 shipped (I used a 15% off coupon plus $1 shipping...it's worth it if you find a "coupon code" box on a site to search google for their coupons...this time I saved almost $4).

The unit is silver-colored metal with a silver plastic front panel and an attractive-enough pane of plastic made to look like sandblasted glass. It has an overall cheap-ish build quality (despite the metal chassis, etc.), but it's a decent looking unit. Not hi-fi jewelry, but what do you expect for $63?

The unit plays back MP3, VCD and SVCD, but it will also play back simple CD's full of files, even mixed files. So, you can dump a bunch of MPEG videos on a disc and it will let you navigate through them. We also have a Mintek DVD-1600 and the navigation system is almost exactly the same.

Even though the file navigations systems of the Digix and the Mintek are basically identical, there are quirks. The Mintek we have, for instance, will not let you fast-forward through MPEG videos. This Digix unit will. However, this unit will not let you page down through the list of MP3's like the Mintek (you have to go one-by-one). So, the Mintek has quirks and the Digix has other quirks. This is weird and I hope someone writes some decent firmware for this thing.

As far as MP3 playback goes, even though this unit cannot page down through the list of MP3's, unlike the Mintek it CAN give you a random and program play (where you make a playlist in order). The awful thing with this unit and MP3 (as with the Mintek), is that it only displays 11 characters of the title. It is, however, sufficient most of the time.

This unit does not play DIVX files.

Speaking of firmware, it is very easy to make this unit free from Macrovision and region-free right out of the box (without firmware upgrades or modifications). I don't know if I can post how to do it here, but search google and you'll easily find it. Just four simple remote control commands and you're at the Factory menu where you can make the region "all" and turn the Macrovision off. It also retains these settings so you don't have to do it each time!

The front buttons have that hard, too-loud "clack" sound when you press them, a feature which screams "cheap player!" Having bought the $44 Mintek unit, I don't particularly want to believe that this $129 retail player is "cheap," but sorry, that's how it comes across. To be fair, the chassis of the unit is perfectly solid enough (compare creaky plastic Sony's and such). The DVD tray that glides out is black plastic and is cheap-feeling. It feels flimsy; I guess I can't complain, considering the price, plus I won't be using it to place things on any time soon, so I'm not particularly worried.

As above, the buttons on the front of the unit ARE NOT lit and this is a real pain when using the unit in the dark. The lit LCD on the front has a cheesy "spinning disc" graphic that I could do without and the display is rather limited in what it shows (most of the time, the elapsed or remaining time, depending on what you set it at).


Regardless, there are plenty of settings to play around with, allowing you to optimize your picture quality based on your viewing habits (for instance, there are film optimized settings and video optimized settings, different ways of displaying the progressive signal) and there are all of the standard ways to configure the speaker outputs from 5.1 down to mono (if you only have one speaker on the side of your TV).

According to various forums on the net, the very best mode is the SuperSmart mode, where the unit does heavy analysis of every pixel on the screen and uses the best method of the bunch for different situations.

All in all, I think that for $63 this player would be right where it ought to be considering the general features; in other words, I wouldn't exactly call this things a great value for the money at $63...probably just fair. However, what really throws it ahead of the pack for extreme value is the VGA output and the progressive scan. Again, I didn't really care for the progressive scan thing at first, and so didn't do research on that particular feature. I was just looking for that computer monitor output (even though I am now using progressive scan with my monitor). With that in mind, I don't know if $63 for a progressive scan player is a good deal or not. I'd imagine it is.

The remote, it must be said, is "cute," but as far as using it goes, it's awful. For instance, it bothers me to no end when a manufacturer makes a DVD remote which has the up/down/left/right menu pointers with NO "Enter/Select" button in the middle of them, for easy access. With this one, there is NO SUCH BUTTON where it ought to be. You have to move down the remote and press "play" to select an option. If you are in the dark, this is awful.

To the remote's credit, though, you can immediately access a lot of the settings buried in the Setup menu with just one button (for instance, I am able to switch from interlaced to progressive and from RGB to YUV, etc. with one button for each function, rather than going through all the menus).

The remote has a volume control right on it, which could be handy if you have no other way to remote control your volume. Other than the aforementioned design flaws and no remote backlighting, it is a fine remote. The colorful look of it is nice, too, certainly better than rows of sqare, grey buttons.

Now on to the main event (for me), the VGA/computer monitor output:

When I first hooked up the VGA output to my computer screen (a 15" flat panel), I got the dreaded "No signal detected" message. Hmmm...after some drama, I figured out that I needed to press the two buttons on the bottom of the remote which let you pick the output method (Progressive scan instead of interlaced) and then the color separation scheme (RGB vs. YUV). I got the RGB progressive scan going and voila, there was my picture.

There was only one small problem though: I was expecting to get the equivalent of 480p "basic" HDTV, and the picture was just as blurry as WinDVD or PowerDVD. I played around with my monitor and determined that the "smoothing" feature was on the monitor. I turned it off, but then the picture went pretty blocky.

I did some research and found out that flat panel monitors only have one "native" resolution; every other one is scaled up or down. This means that when I tried to look at the 640 x 480 VGA signal on my 1024 x 768 flat panel monitor, it looked blocky without smoothing or too blurry with smoothing. With that in mind, make sure that your flat-panel monitor has *nothing short of excellent scaling* before you buy this for that purpose...otherwise, get ready for blur or block!

Next, I hooked the unit up to my CRT monitor, which is where it got interesting: the bottom line was that I purchased this thing to watch my Judy Garland Show DVD's on. I also have various Judy movies on DVD. I will start with the good and then move to the bad. First, "The Harvey Girls," which was filmed in Technicolor and received an incredible transfer job by Warner, looked absolutely incredible. The first thing I noticed was the absolute purity of color, the solid reality of those colors. The sharpness/clarity, however, suffered just a touch. This was probably the monitor, a mid-priced Philips '99 model.

The stinky part was when I stuck in the Judy Garland show DVD's: any motion would give "feathering" of edges, just the thing that I thought would be gone with progressive scan (vs. interlaced)! Now, this really stunk! Every DVD was like that. I then tried the Kirsten Dunst movie "Get Over It," and got mostly the same thing, but somewhat less. That feathering stayed, no matter what picture mode I put it in (the least "feathery" mode was "Smart," but that gave a blur). Even the "SuperSmart" mode could not perfectly process the signal.

The only reasonable explanation I can think of is either that the encoding on "The Harvey Girls" was either more "native" to the 640 x 480 VGA signal, or it was encoded at a significantly higher quality than the others, leading to a much higher quality of computer monitor playback.

The differences between these discs was stunning. I have read online that most players will do a good job with well-encoded discs, but the real test is badly-encoded discs. I have, in the past, noticed significant encoding artifacts (blocky grey-to-white gradients, for example) on the Judy Garland Show discs, which leads me to believe that these were not encoded to the absolute highest standards. With that in mind, if the true test of a DVD player is it's ability to handle badly-encoded discs, this one failed miserably (note that I am only talking about the VGA output here; I cannot vouch for the ProgScan component outputs, as I don't have anything to hook that to).

With the performance of less quality than what I typically get in WinDVD with my "favorite" discs, I have decided to return this player to Overstock.com (a return that could be the subject of my next review, depending on how easily it goes).

Again, in the end, I returned this as it did not perform well with not-perfectly-encoded discs. There was considerable "feathering" (just like with interlaced video, but suprisingly WORSE) in the picture with many of my discs, though some did play with amazing quality.

Recommended: No

Amount Paid (US$): 63