djsimard's Full Review: Philips DVP5960/37 DVD Player
I must say that in the past I have been using a lot of Philips products from Electronics to Sonicare to most of my Kitchen Small Appliances and have been very happy with them ... until the past few years. The latest unit I have purchased is the DVP5900 DivX with HDMI connection and it is a disappointment because of the quality of the unit. The following review will describe the issues.
THE UNIT : The unit in itself is a thin design thus easily stackable since the vents are in the back of the unit. The front of the unit has the major available buttons but you must have the remote to set it up. The response time of the unit after pressing any buttons is fairly slow. All the necessary connections in the back of the unit are available except that for sound there is only a COAX output and no DIGITAL. The assumption here is that Philips expects consumers will connect the unit using the HDMI connection to a Receiver with an HDMI input for both sounds and images.
THE REMOTE : Philips has always designed it's remote so that they feel comfortable and are easy to use and this one follows that standard. The strength of the remote offers a fairly good 45 degree breath, so you don't have to be directly in front of the unit for it to respond. The remote does not lite up however.
THE USER MANUAL : Philips has improved quiet a bit in regards to their documentation. The manual is clear and has a logical flow to it. There is a also a quick install.
FEATURES : The setup is easy and straightforward. The on-screen menu is intuitive even without looking at the manual unless it's the first time you've installed a DVD player. Once it's up and working you have the standard features of most DVD players. I like that the FF is increased each time you press the button. This eliminates the chance of doing a Chapter Skip my mistake when, from other manufacturer, you have to keep the button pressed in order to increase it. So you get FF/RW up to 20X and also you get SLOW in increments of ½. There are also three different search capabilities which includes chapter search, the index search and the time search so it pretty much covers it all. The one feature that is missing is the 10/20 secs skip forward or backward which I would have liked to have it. However, one great option is the STATUS that is available from the remote. What you get is you just don't see amount of time you've been watching but it also shows you how much time the entire block is. So is your watching some bonus material, you can know exactly how long that segment that you are watching is going to be and that even works on the menu, which I think is a very cool thing, because as you know, a lot of the menus have added those little funny remarks and now you know how long the loop is.
COMPATIBILITY : On this one, Philips delivers. It plays everything unless it's the wrong region code. I have two Panasonics, one Sony and one Samsung DVD player and it's the only one that I can play all of the different format available from JPEG to CD image to DVD all formats.
IMAGE : The HDMI image quality is excellent. The Progressive Mode is also pretty good but goes against why you would want to purchase the unit. I've tested the THX image setup and it passed it with flying colors both when setup at 16:9 and 4:3.
THE PROBLEMS : Now here is where the unit fails ... and fails big time. The product is flaky at best and let's remember that I've exchanged it 3 times with different manufactured dates ( September 2005, October 2005 and the current unit that I own is November 2005). Let's begin with the HDMI connection. Most of the units that are available for purchase have the softare V2.20 which has two problems, namely that when you use the HDMI connection, the default PCM sound cannot be switched off and when you insert a DVD you will get a error message that tells you that your connected device is not HDCP compliant. Philips has come out with a Firmware Upgrade (the statement is valid as of March 21, 2006 and is available on the website) which will bring your unit to V2.26 and supposedly correct both issues. I have updated the unit and it does indeed correct the HDMI sound issue thus your receiver will be able to reproduce AC3, DTS, etc. Now, on the other hand, the HDCP error does not get corrected, but you just have to press OK and the image is fine. Unfortunately there are side effects to the upgrade. The major one is that if you want to setup your unit to be able to display at 1080i once you have performed the upgrade, you will get an error message and thus will not be able to upscale and unfortunately there is not way to revert back. What I had to do is to return the unit back and exchange it at the store for a new unit (I was still with the 30 day return policy). What you need to do is to setup the display option BEFORE to perform the upgrade. Once you have done so, the upscale will work fine. Another nasty problem is that if you press the DISPLAY button too often, the unit will go on Standby and another problem is that if you let your unit go to the Screen Saver and you come back and press play to resume, the disk will not play anymore. You must press Stop and then play again to resume. Unfortunately Support is not help at all. Other issues are that the unit may freeze while you're FF, for example, and the only way to get out of it is to disconnect it from the power outlet and plug it back in. This is very disappointing that Philips would let a unit like this come out with so many bugs and defects and unfortunately it looks like a trend from Philips in the past couple of years. I truly don't know how long we will see Philips products in America since they have dropped their Kitchen line and have reduced their Electronics drastically. In any case, at the time of writing this evaluation, these were all the problems that I had encountered. We'll see what the future brings.
SUMMARY : Bottom line is skip it. Too many bugs and defects.
Philips DVP5960 is a Multi Region DVD Player with a built in PAL to NTSC video converter, which will convert PAL formatted discs for viewing on a stan...More at Amazon Marketplace
Manufacturer: Philips ElectronicsManufacturer Part Number: DVP5960Manufacturer Website Address: www.usa.philips.comProduct Name: DVP5960 DVD PlayerPro...More at Overstock.com
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