DVD's and MP3's, please!
Written: Jan 17 '02 (Updated Jan 18 '02)
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Pros: Excellent picture and sound quality in a sleek and handsome unit.
Cons: Plays MP3's well enough, but MP3 menu navigation was an obvious afterthought.
The Bottom Line: Unless you're looking for a unit specifically for playing your MP3 discs, you can't go wrong with the DV-440. Solid, sleek, lovely, high quality component. Buy it!
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| jackmahagauf's Full Review: Pioneer DV-440 DVD Player |
For Christmas this year, my mother wanted to buy my family a “family gift”, and suggested getting us a DVD player. Rather than trudging out to the store, buying no particular unit, and shipping it 800 miles to us, she simply sent me a check for $150 and instructed me to buy a DVD player on her behalf. Good choice, mom. This allowed me to do a little bit of research and shop around a bit to find a decent player. I eventually settled on the DV-440. It was just marginally outside my price range, looked good on the shelf, and was well spoken for by the boys at the local Best Buy. (Clarification: Implying that I put any credence in the opinions of the pimply-faced ware peddlers at Best Buy is pure sarcasm, I assure you.) So, I purchased the 440 and headed home.
My existing television set has no component in jacks on the back; just a simple coax connection that’s fed by the VCR. I figured that I’d easily be able to hook the DVD player up to the auxiliary audio and video in jacks on the back of the VCR, and view the DVD feed by setting the VCR to the “AUX” channel. Well, this worked, soft of. Yeah, you could watch a movie that way, but the picture would split up, flicker, and oscillate between normal and reduced brightness levels. A friend of mine told me that this is the result of some kind of copy protection feature built into DVD players to prevent copying DVD movies onto tape, and that I could thwart the problem by placing an “RF modulator” between the DVD player and the VCR. “Aw' screw it”, I said. I’ve been looking for an excuse to get a new TV anyway, so back to the electronics store I went.
So, I dropped an additional three C-notes on a brand new 27 inch Panasonic stereo television. I figure the new TV would be my “family present”. My wife was seriously trying to talk me into spending $1200 for an HDTV monitor, and nearly had me convinced. But I held firm and, in the end, my staunch frugality won out. For $300, the Panasonic has a reasonably high quality picture, decent stereo sound, and a whole slew of component jacks in the rear. With the additional purchase of a few more S-Video, component video, and stereo cables, I was able to hook the DVD player AND the digital cable decoder directly into the TV, both benefiting greatly from not having to go through the VCR.
D@mn, that’s a nice picture! Sure, compared to an HDTV monitor, the noticeable scan lines of my new 27 inch TV stick out like a sore thumb. But aside from that, the picture is sweet! The DV-440 does a fine job at decoding DVDs. The video is rock solid and crystal clear (as I’m sure is the case with most DVD players), and the sound is true and warm. Ok, sure, I don’t exactly have a system that would push the DV-440 to its limits. But for my purposes, the 440 does a fine job. Menu navigation is relatively straightforward and intuitive. The remote control, in my opinion, doesn’t appear to be laid out in a manor any more complicated than comparable units. I was especially impressed with the sheer number of possible video output choices on the back of the unit (composite video, component video, S-video, and optical).
If I had one gripe with the DV-440, it would be its handling of MP3 discs. The fact that this unit could play MP3 CD-Rs was one of the key features that drew me to it. And, indeed, the DV-440 does a relatively fine job of decoding and playing MP3s. Trying to navigate through a disc with 120 songs on it using the on screen menu, however, isn’t terribly user friendly. If you know a song’s “number”, you can punch it in using the numeric buttons on the remote. Or, you can scroll, six or seven songs at a time, through the entire disc, searching for a particular song. The later option is made even less desirable by the fact that only the first few letters of each file name (not the ID3 tag) are displayed on screen. This, in my case, is usually the first few letters of the artist’s name, followed by a tilde (~). Let’s say that I’ve got a disc with fifteen or twenty songs by the Red Hot Chili Peppers on it. If I’m trying to find a particular song by scrolling through the menu, all I see is that I’ve got fifteen songs by “Red Ho~”. To find the song I’m looking for, I may have to preview the first few seconds of a good six or seven other songs first. This may seem like a minor annoyance, but it gets tiresome after just a short while. Generally, I just prefer to burn a disk with a good mix of songs on it, pop it into the DV-440, and hit the “Random” button on the remote.
Overall, the DV-440 is a very solid, very friendly, high quality unit. Unless you’re seriously into MP3s and are looking for a deck specifically for playing them, the DV-440 won’t let you down.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 159.00
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Epinions.com ID:
jackmahagauf
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Location: Lexington, KY
Reviews written: 5
Trusted by: 1 member
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