ParisLemon's Full Review: Philips DVP642 DVD Player
A few weeks ago I needed a new DVD player in a major way. Believe it or not I had been using my Xbox as my primary DVD player in the living room for a couple of years now (I know it's a horrible player and I had quite a few problems with it), but I recently traded in the Xbox and was stuck with only the option of watching DVDs on my computer. I immediately headed over to Best Buy to take a look at some new players (didn't want to shop online, since I wanted one immediately).
While I'll admit that the Phillips DVP642 was not my first choice...I wanted a Sony player to match my TV...I feel it was ultimately a good choice. Best Buy was out of the Sony player I was looking at and I did something unusual for me, I took the advice of the Best Buy sales guy. He recommended I check out the Phillips player, touting it's DIVX playback capabilites; this piqued my interest. I walked over and looked at the price: $55, sold.
Hookup was simple; I bought some component cables for the included component hook-up this player has and was ready within minutes had the player up and running. If you too plan on using the component cables, remember to select that input setting when you first go through your player's setup (this is not the default setting). Now remember that I was coming from using the Xbox as my primary DVD player, and compared to that this thing is wonderous. First of all it's very slim (about 1/3 or 1/4 as slim as the bulky Xbox) and fits perfectly on top of my cable box in my entertainment center. I would have prefered a slot-loading DVD player, but those are still few and far between for some reason, so having the slim tray on this one isn't bad. A word to the wise for this however: be careful that your DVD is laying flat in the established area for the DVD on the tray. The tray is so thin that it seems like it would be easy to just plop the DVD down anywhere on the tray and push the 'close' button, scratching your DVD and potentially harming the player.
I popped in a DVD to test the player out. I chose a DVD that I had rented from Netflix that was giving me problems recently when I had tried to play it on my Xbox...the DVD was a bit dirty but it seemed to play fine on my laptop so I wanted to see how it would do on the new player; it worked perfectly. No skips. No stalls. Smooth playback. That is almost worth the $55 I paid right there. The picture quality is very nice. This DVD player supports progressive scan playback, so be sure to use it along with the aforementioned component cables if you have a TV capable of showing progressive images.
The next thing I wanted to test was the DIVX playback of the player. I burned a .divx file from my computer onto a CD and popped it in; the file immediately started playing which was actually pretty nice (no FBI warnings, no loading menu screens, etc...), however the picture was a jumbled to begin with. I stopped the playback and tried again, same result. I thought maybe the CD just didn't burn correctly, so I tried another one; same results. I was disappointed until I tried fast-forwarding the movie...this cleared the image right up! While it's a little annoying that it doesn't play the image right the first time, and I'm not sure why that is, fast forwarding the .divx file worked everytime to clear up the image. While DIVX files are't known for their great image (after all they are highly compressed video files), the movie looked pretty nice on my TV.
I have also heard that this DVD player will play PAL encoded DVDs (the method the rest of the world uses as opposed to the USA's NTSC). I haven't tried this feature out yet, but this could certainly come in handy for some of the obscure foreign films I often have a hard time getting ahold of.
My two biggest complaints with the player are relatively minor seeing as how much I paid for the thing...1) I don't really like the remote included with it...and 2) It doesn't play back DVD-Rs. I noticed on the packaging that there was no mention of DVD-R playback, only DVD+R and all the others; this is confusing until you realize that Phillips rivals Sony and a few other companies created the DVD-R format while Phillips helped create the DVD+R; there was still question as to what the standard would be for recordable DVDs. While this is annoying given that I have a few DVD-Rs I'd like to play on the player, it's certainly not a deal breaker as the DVD-R is basically the same as the DVD+R and almost every DVD burner can record to either. Just remember to buy DVD+Rs if you buy this player and have a DVD burner! Now the remote is simply small and doesn't have a very good range. I've come to expect better from remotes after using the TiVo remote for years as well as a nice Sony model. Still, as with everything else, I must say this remote is an upgrade over the Xbox DVD player remote...which was little more then a cheap RCA rip-off...God I hated that player.
All in all I'm happy with my purchase of the Phillips DVP642 DVD player. It is certainly not the perfect machine, but with features such as progressive scan playback and DIVX file playing all for a price of $55 dollars, it's really a great deal. Be sure to search the Internet and check out Best Buy to make sure you get a good price on this player.
Measures 17.1 x 1.7 x 9.3 inches (W x H x D); Plays DVD-Video, video CD, audio CD, JPEG image CD, and CDs loaded with MP3, MPEG-4, or DivX 3.11/4.x/5....More at Amazon Marketplace
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