Well I have always been a huge Philips fan (as you can probably see from all the other Philips products I've reviewed), so needless to see it hurts me even more when a Philips product is less than great. I wanted this player since the first time I saw it at Target, but since at the time I didn't need a second player and the prices was not justified to me, I opted not to buy it. About a month ago though I started looking for a player for my bedroom, and after trying a Cyberhome and another Philips DVP320 (the one which I'll end up keeping), I found a great deal on thie cool looking player on ebay so I had to buy it. Well I've only had it for about 3 days now but I am already quite disapointed and honestly regret buying it.

First I'll start with why I thought I would like it. The most important thing for my bedroom player was the small form factor, that was the common thing between the 3 players I compared - they're all pretty small. What I was missing on the Cyberhome and the other Philips was the front panel display. This unit does have one. Big plus.
The second most important thing about it is the built in Dobly Digital and DTS decoders. For this feature alone I am still thinking about keeping it instead of the other Philips. Now I know that having a surround sound in your bedroom is a little out there and probably unnecessary luxury, but the thing is once you have surround sound you have very little desire to watch anything without it. So I don't really want to spend all the money on a fully blown second surround system, and those complete systems in a box for around $100 are really bad. So my thought was keep this player, use its built in decoders and add a decent quality computer speakrs package and there you go - you get a decent sound for reasonable amount of money and also have a good quality player.
The other features I like about this player are the full selection of outputs - you get component, s-video, and composite for video, and also both optical and coaxial digital outs for sound - which is rare for portable models, and lately becoming less and less common even on full sized components. There are also the 6 analog outputs for DD and DTS. The inconvinience here come from having to use the front left and right outputs of the multichanel outpus if you're just connecting the player to a stero system or a tv. This way you have to specifically go into the players menu and turn off the rest of the chanels, so the player will downcovert the soundtrack to 2 chanels. This is actually rather confusing.
There is also a 5.1 chanel output, that I had never seen before. It is designed to be used with certain Philips 5.1 ready receivers, but I have a Philips receiver and have seen others but have never really seen that input on any of them. In short - this input seems useless to me, and it takes up space on the back panel. Even worse though, because of it there are about a dozen additional buttons on the remote control, designed to control that illusive Philips receiver.

Here we come to my biggest problem with this player - its remote control. It is in my opinion unnecessary big, ill designed, and hard to get used to. It is in fact very different than any other Philips remote. If you are a Philips fan you are probably aware of the fact that the company goes through remote styles and during certain periods their remotes look very similar for all of their products. I have a lot of other Philips gear and am quite used to the layouts and features and everything, so this remote is totally unfamiliar, and seems like it has been borrowed from some generic brand that you can only find in your local gas station convinience store.

Perhaps I could get used to the remote and everything else, but the one feature that I cannot get over is the lack of resume play. This means that if you turn off the power or eject the disc you cannot start again from the same place where you left off. The player will resume playback from the last place only if you press stop and leave the disc in without powering off. Still when you do that though, the auto power off feature will turn it off in about 5 minutes so if you're gone for longer than that too bad.

Navigation of the disc is the other really weak point. You cannot access chapters on the disc directly with the number buttons on the remote. You have to first push GOTO, which is "conviniently" burried on the opposite - bottom - side of the remote, somewhere among a ton of other similarly shaped buttons. Forget about finding it in the dark. So your only option of finding the place you left off before the player powered itself down, is scrolling with the arrow search buttons till you get to the right place. HUGE PROBLEM!!!

Also by common sense I thought that like every other Philips player, this would let you use the fast search and slow motion commands by pressing the 4 arrow keys used for meny navigation. This is available on every other Philips player and is one of my favorite features. Unfortunately it is not available on this machine and instead you have to use the dedicated buttons, which are much harder to locate in the dark than the big, convinient arrow buttons.

The next navigation problem is the confusing fast and slow motion speeds. Most players give you the actual acceleration when in fast or slow motion - usually x2, x4, x8 and so on. My other Philips players have 5 speeds in each mode. This one only has 3. And instead of telling you x2, x16 and so on it only tells you mode 1, 2, or 3, so it is really unknown how much faster or slower the player is playing. While this is not a major problem, it really bothers me. The picture during the fast and slow motion modes is also quite jerky and noticably less smooth than my other players.

Now I do want to say that the picture quality on this player is just as good as any other player I've ever seen. I noticed several other reviews talking about problems with the picture quality. It sounded to me like both of the other reviewers had not set up the player correctly. Keep in mind that this player is both NTSC and Pal compatible, as well as S-video and component video enabled. The unfortunate part is that with all its functionality it is quite confusing during set up. You have to make sure to choose the right output through the player's menu. It is impossible to use the S-video and the Component video at the same time. This way the output that has not been selected will only produce black and white or highly distorted image. This is a big mistake in my opinion.

That said though, if you set it up correctly - both the output and the color system setting, you should get a perfect picture. If you are sure you have done that and still don't have a good picture, that means something is wrong with your unit.

THIS PLAYER DOES HAVE A REALLY GOOD PICTURE!!!

The sound seems fine to me. Haven't hooked it up to my home theater system, but through the tv's speakers it's volume level seems to be good enough. It did bother me a little bit when I read the specifications though. The signal to noise ration is rated at only 90 db, which is about the avarage for CDs, but normally for DVD players I am used to seeing something closer to 100 and above. Also the stereo seperation at 85db seems a little low too. If you are going to use the digital outputs though, all that doesn't make any difference, and is most probably unaudible anyways.

Another deficiency of this model is the lack of bass management for the 5.1 output. While you can select on/off for each chanel, you cannot select the size of the speakers. Which means if you are using sattelite/subwoofer speaker system, the player will not redirect low frequencies to the subwoofer, and this might overload your sattelites. At the very least you will not get sufficient bass response without it.

Although I am seriously thinking about selling it back on ebay, there are many nice features that make me want to keep it.The built in decoders, the slot loading mechanism, which by the way is really cool, and the excellent picture quality are all deffinite pluses. On top of that this model is really very compatible - NTSC and Pal formats, 12V power supply makes it possible to take in a car or wherever, and the region code is really easy to change.

If it only had a better remote and a play resume...

Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 50.00