My husband is an insomniac. We’ve tried all sorts of things to get him to sleep, but the only thing that seems to work is watching TV. He used to fall asleep on the couch and then, when he woke up, he’d shut everything off and come to bed. Of course, by the time he'd turned everything off and climbed the stairs to bed he’d be half-awake again. So we tried putting a TV beside the bed. That sort of worked because when he woke up he could just switch it off and roll over. Unfortunately, the light bothered him. I was a pretty large TV to have sitting a foot from his face while he was trying to fall asleep. He was also worried about it keeping me awake. He didn’t need to. I grew up on a busy road with semis passing the house at all hours of the night and a father who snored like a freight train going up a mountain.

And then minidisk players came out.

First we bought a Polaroid thinking that the brand name meant something. I guess the brand name does mean something, just not what I thought it did.

When the Polaroid keeled over, Dennis had been using the minidisk player for 3 months and it was working like a charm (for the insomnia.) He could just set it on his chest and watch until he fell asleep. The brightness level and the volume could be adjusted easily, so he had to have another one.

The guy in Best Buy recommended Insignia saying that he’d just bought one for his own brother. As sketchy as that recommendation was, we bought one and we haven’t been disappointed.

This player is small, a bit larger than a double DVD box, with a 7-inch screen and extremely lightweight. Its outside color is silver and black. The screen flips up. The power switch is on the left with the In/Out audio button and jack and the outlet jack. The cord is about 6 feet long. To open the DVD tray you have to slide a little tab in the front and the lid pops up. The volume and brightness knobs are both on the right side with the headphone jacks. Along the face beside the DVD tray are the usual controls including one that allows you to switch between wide angle and full screen.

There are a couple of things I don’t like about this player. We have a lot of DVDs with subtitled with weird audio tracks that we need to turn off. To do that we need the remote control, which is wafer thin, about 3 inches long and incredibly easy to lose. What do you even need a remote for? The player's too small to put more than an arm’s length away.

I also wish that you could turn it off by closing the lid. The way we use it, it would be very nice if you could just close the lid and have the machine shut down. Instead you have to fiddle with buttons in the dark.

Other than that, this has been a great player. We bought it about 6 months ago and as I said my husband falls asleep to it every night and he occasionally watches movies on it when I’m hogging the big TV so it gets a couple hours play every day so it has seen a lot of routine use. He’s even dropped it on the floor while half asleep and it’s still working perfectly. The picture is nice and crisp and the color is good. We used it on the flight over (17 hours confined to a coach class seat, what else were we going to do?) and had no trouble with it, though it was difficult to hear over the engines, but what can you hear over airplane engines?

If you are in the market for a minidisk player, this is a good one. We have given this player a real workout between dragging it across an ocean, using it daily and dropping it on the floor (twice in one night even.) It has handled several different regions and DVD R without a hitch. It’s even played disks that the player attached to the TV has rejected. It is the Best Buy house brand, but that doesn’t mean it’s of lesser quality than a brand name. If Polaroid is anything to go by, it’s better. And it’s cheaper!

** We've just gotten another player and Best Buy must have changed suppliers. The picture is no where near as good as it was. Such a shame because the last one ran for over a year with heavy use.


Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 100