Choosing A DVD Player Depends on Your Wants and Your Wallet
Jul 18 '02 (Updated Jul 21 '02)
The Bottom Line Assess your needs and your bank account and get a good DVD player.
We are looking for simplicity in consumer comfort zones when we are selecting a DVD player. There are several ways you can go with selecting and purchasing a unit like this today.
The simplest way to go is to go to Wally World and get something like an Emerson TV-DVD Player. You just slap in the DVD movie and voila!, you're good to go.
The most common way to go, though, is the way most people have gone the first time. You go get a high quality DVD player like Sony and go home and attach it to your TV. You can hook up your VCR along the wire path so that you can use either recorder, too.
These high-quality DVD players have great features, of course. The still framed pause is vastly superior to anything like it on a VCR. And often the DVD disks come with tons of bells and whistles so you can enjoy your DVD in a lot of ways.
You may wish to choose what I recently chose: a combination DVD/VCR Player. They aren't all that much more expensive than a high-quality DVD standalone unit, and you don't have to buy TWO space-taking machines (a DVD machine and a VCR machine) that way. The newer units of this combination type are very generous with the line-in and line-out plugs, so they will be compatible with most TVs and other peripherals like a home theater setup.
The top-end way to go with this is to skip the TV altogether. Go to a high quality electronics store, buy a good quality DVD machine, and couple it to a ceiling-mounted digital video projector and, say, a 10X20 projection screen against the far wall, with a good home theater speaker sytem. You'll never need to go to the multiplex theater again unless you want to catch your movie in its first week. If you go this route, expect to mortgage your house and cars to pay for it, but hey, it's worth it for the way you get to see your movies with a STAR-TREK level of entertainment value right now in 2002.
Anyway you do this in the summer of 2002, there is an even better DVD machine that is not in the middle-expensive mass market production range ($300-$1000) yet (that I am aware of). This is, of course, the on-the-far-horizon DVD/VCR RECORDER. I would like to own a DVD/VCR recorder so I can transfer all my old family VCR tapes onto DVDs without having to hassle with a computer and cordage and special software (which IS available now if your level of computer expertise is high enough for you to figure it all out.) I just want a simple machine that lets me burn my own family DVDs straight from my private VCR tapes in the VCR bay of the same machine. Simple enough for bozo the clown (me), right? Then I can make duplicate DVDs of all my kids-growing-up tapes for my sisters and all my other family members and mail them to them and bore them for years.
The DVD picture image is superior to anything so far (7/02) like it. And it's great having all those extra features that come with DVDs today. Best of all, perhaps, the DVD disk will still be showing you the movie decades after VCR tapes have all lost their ability to show you the show because the tape simply wore out or lost its ability to be played.
So if you get a machine, don't settle for some cheap piece of junk. Get an expensive piece of junk (no, just kidding.) If you will be using it often, get a real DVD Player with a name brand and a good one. Quality counts in this area. You'll be glad you moved up to the 21st century. Enjoy!
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Ed.Williamson
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Member: Ed Williamson
Location: Way Out West, USA
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Fight 'em till Hell freezes over, then fight 'em on the ice!
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