Cons: Horride interface. Must be off to show clock. Only custom options: Text color, background
The Bottom Line: If you must have this display, be sure to use the unit before buying and weigh the heafty cost of a having a crappy deck vs having a good display.
angusbeef's Full Review: Sony CDX-M9900 Car CD/ MP3 Player
The TFT display is what originally caught my eye. Almost every review I read everywhere on the internet had a 5/5 for this player. I think these are people who put the player in their dash took one look at the display, ran to their computers and wrote their awe inspiring comments. I have had this player for 5 or 6 days now.
My thoughts at first agreed with all the reviews I had read. But I found many flaws for which I am cutting my loses and listing my deck on ebay. Here are my dissapointments.
With a display that can show movies and display pictures, one would think that there would be limitless possibilities to the look of displaying simple text while listening to the radio or an mp3 cd. WRONG. You get to pick from 3 skins. All of which are extremely insufficient and just display the same information in different locations on the display: Station Name/ID3 tag, Function Icons, File/Folder number/Frequency/Track time. You cannot change the size of this information which means the ID3 tag information is TINY and barely readable except on a plain black background (kind of defeats the purpose of the neat display) and the File/folder numbers are HUGE and contain a horrific leading zero which means folder 5 song 20 gives you 005/020 displayed HUGE with no explaination of its meaning. And beside that you have barely readable scrolling text of Tracktitle/album/artist/ slowly. You can't speed it up, or choose to change any information from being displayed. Of the neat TFT display you get 1 option in the customization of the text displayed. You can change the color! Oh but there are still some things on the display that must remain a pale blue color for some unforseen reason.
My biggest petpeve of all? There is only one way to display the month/date/time.... you have to TURN OFF THE DECK! Wow who over saw that tiny detail at Sony.
To cusomize the background is no small task. The only way to caputure or load images is to connect a device to the Video-in and press the capture button. Then unless you have the image stretched 3 times is normal length, distorted beyond any resemblence of itself, the image will be tiled. You get no option to just display it in the middle, it HAS to be tiled. So you want a picture of yoru car on there? You get STRETCHED 3x wide, or TILED three times accross the screen. I have seen descriptons of the deck that say you can have it display album covers as they play, but later found out that that is actually a different sony cd player!
The video in is ok. But it is just that Video in on a 1 inch, by 1.5 inch display. Granted you can stretch the image which looks half way presentable on widescreen video. I tried and tried to watch a movie on this, play one of those 20 in 1 atari controllers that have RCA jacks. It was horridly small and not even worth my time.
So I have a $400 deck in my car that is so bright I can see it out of the corner of my eye and every second reminds me what a fool I was for buying it. My friends all thought it was cool looking, but I did my best to not let them try to use it, or they would see the disasterous interface and what a fool I was for buying it.
OK, the good things about this deck. The sound is pretty good for a Sony. It also has a 7 and equalizer. The 32,000 colors are very pretty looking.
But when I'm told by other reviews this deck has "the best display you've ever seen" I expect a ton more. I consider more than just the displayable colors as "the display." Also consider the fact that the displayed information is no more customizable than a deck with a completely digital display. I'm conviced Sony built a display and chuckled "wow I bet we can get any fool to buy this just from its looks" and let a monkey design the interface and rest of the deck. If you read reviews and think this is at all a good deck. Do youfself a favor and make sure you get to see one and play with it before you buy it. Don't worry it wont take long with the limited options.
XM satellite-radio-ready CD/tuner head unit with 32,000-color TFT display 52 watts x 4 peak output power (23.2 wpc RMS); 4-volt front/rear/subwoofer p...More at Amazon Marketplace
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