Philips almost has me won over
Written: Aug 25 '03
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Pros: A quality player that handles many formats and media.
Cons: Slow to read disk format. Can't shuffle MP3 disks, or "play all disks/shuffle" very well.
The Bottom Line: I didn't rate it excellent because of my minor gripes, but overall, I'm happy with this machine. If your looking, buy it.
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| jasonnadler's Full Review: Philips DVD793CH Multi-disc DVD Player |
Okay, let me start off with the bad points. The player takes forever to read a disk. What I mean by that is when you put a disk in, the player has to determine if it's an audio cd, mp3, DVD, vcd, or svcd. This takes about 30-45 seconds. If you're used to putting a disk in and hitting play, this seems to take forever. To quote Yellow Submarine, "a minute is a very long time." Then tere are some smaller issues. Fill the carousel with audio cd's. Select play all. Now try to shuffle. It shuffles all the songs on each single disk before moving on to the next disk. My old CD carousel shuffled everything simultaneously, which I liked. It made for a better mix of music as it shuffled all the disks. Finally, insert an mp3 cd. It lists all the songs alphabetically in your tv, and plays them in this order - only this order. It will not shuffle in this mode, and it will not play all in this mode. It only plays the mp3 disk and that's it. Of course that means it plays about 8 hours of music, but what I don't like about this is that I had to rename each file by randomly assigning it a double letter to start off it's name - this effectively "randomized" the disk since it plays alphabetically.
Now for the good points. The picture is great. It plays almost everything, CD, CD-R, VCD, SVCD, DVD, DVD R. Unfortunately, it doesn't play J-Pegs, but since it plays VCD's, you can make a VCD slideshow with music and play that instead. The remote is simple and no frills, which is important. All the buttons are cool for about 30 seconds. This has many functions, all controlled by the remote, but since it isn't a universal remote it makes playing a disk much simpler.
Reading the manual is important, there are many settings and knowing how to set up is important. It has progressive scan, DTS, Dolby Digital, Black level (video black is technically a 6 on a scale of brightness. This resets it to 0 resulting in richer contrast). However, not knowing where to find these settings results in confusion and poor performance, so take the 5 minutes to read.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 184
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Epinions.com ID:
jasonnadler
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Member: Jason Nadler
Location: Wading River, NY, US
Reviews written: 18
Trusted by: 1 member
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