After not reading enough reviews for this DVD player online, I thought buying this player for about $150.00 was not a bad idea - a small investment for a DVD player with quite a few features. I was wrong. After having this player for less than a month, I have experienced much stress due to it. After experiencing much trouble, I did some more research on this player to find out my situation was not unique. My player was not simply a lemon, the model is. It is being returned as soon as the shipping labels arrive from the retailer.

Reasons to NOT purchase this player.
Lengthy layer-change pauses (it even back steps about .5-1 second).
The slightest scratch (not as bad as a typical rental) will cause it to pause (if you're lucky) or skip backwards up to a minute.
Problems with numerous brand-new DVDs - Shawshank Redemption, American Pie, Matrix (as expected, although, I have not gotten the free (2.5 week turnaround time) internal upgrade for the player), and others.
It has a loud and slow DVD tray, as well as slow spin-up time.

Reasons one may think they should purchase this P.O.S. over other DVD players in the same price range.
It has a zoom feature which many others don't.

Don't be fooled, this player performs like many PCs out there do. Based on the specs, one would think it would work, but, in practice, it crashes and causes stress more frequently than it should. I have used a PC-DVD player - 2nd generation Creative PCDVD player with their Dxr2 card and had less stress, and definitely less trouble with damaged, or undamaged DVDs. Put your money to better use - based on reviews from this site and others, I've decided to put my money into the Pioneer DV-414 or DV-525 for about $40 more. It has received excellent reviews and very few complaints about layer-change/other stutter/skip problems - which should be the typical movie-watchers primary concern. I hope your selection is excellent.

Notes on review details:
Picture quality and sound are very close to identical between players when players perform like they're supposed to - players don't leave artifacts, pixelate, and sound certainly doesn't have static when being decoded from a digital output by an AC3 decoder.

Equipment Used:
27" Sony Television w/ S-Video Inputs
Denon AVR 2700 Receiver (w/ DD decoding)
Zenith DVD2200
Monster cable interconnects



Recommended: No