Panasonic CQ-DF783U Car CD/ MP3 Player

Pros: Economical, highly visible display with dimmer, highly compatible Panasonic CD reader.
Cons: No gapless play, may skip on VBR streams, ignores rapid input sequences, dimmer control buried.

My unit is marked as manufactured in January 2003. I used this deck for just 2 days; here are some quick first impressions and notable quotes from the manual.

MP3 Playback. There are no audible flaws in decoding the bitstream. There are...

Pros: Stylish, Multi-Functional, Good Build Quality
Cons: Horrible Usability

I wanted to like this CD player when I got it. I really did. I've used it since May 2003, and have come to co-exist with its flaws. The Good: First of all, this player will grab your attention. The gray color and layout with bright blue di ...

Pros: Ample illumination for display! This thing is BRIGHT! Panasonic reliability. Plays wide range of CDR/CDRW.
Cons: Cannot display clock and song titles at the same time. No scroll speed adjustment.

I was looking for something relatively cheap, but not cheap in quality, that plays MP3s! The Panasonic totally performs well and throws in a few great features to boot. Originally, I was looking at Kenwood (also produced by the same company as ...

Pros: Sound!!!, MP3/WMA support,
Cons: Display too bright!

I got this unit because I wanted something with a line-in jack (for my Minidiscs), Changer controls, bass, ect. and no EQ. I wanted something that I could just plug in a CD and not have to fiddle with sounds. The sound quality delivers STRONGLY. I ...

Pros: Looks, price, extensive feature list.
Cons: Slow reading sometimes, slow scrolling.

Boy is this one a looker. Day or night this head unit attracts a lot of attention. It has a cool blue backlit display that most other head units don't have. It's also packed with features, most importantly for me the MP3 playback. One CD is almost all you'll need. The best thing about this panasonic though is the price. You can probably find these on ebay for around $130 now. Well there has to be some drawbacks right? It can be a little on the slow side when scrolling through folders on an MP3 CD but it goes from song to song rather quickly. It also scrolls painfully slow when displaying the artist/tile/filename etc. But when it comes down to it you get a whole lot of bang for not a lot of buck.

Pros: Looks nice, it isn't hard on the eyes, girls like the look.
Cons: Slow, Brightness settings suck, skips, slow text/song changes.

I used to own the 383 version (lower, lower model). Anyways it was too slow for me and had no sub out. I upgraded to the 783 and to my dismay it is just as slow!!
It takes 5-7 seconds to start up...skips more than my 383 did and it still has slow text scrolling, folder changing and remote song changing. I hate this, if i have a chick in the car or I want to show the system off I don't want to tell everyone, wait for it...wait for it...wait for it... because it takes so friggin long to start up. It really p*sses me off and I upgraded from the 383 expecting faster at least just a little but no its the same. I wouldn't buy this again ever.

Pros: Looks cool, inexpensive, knob volume control, reads scratched discs better than the jvc
Cons: two band eq, too bright, poor bass response, takes too long to read mp3 cds

I bought this mp3-cd player to go into my second car, so I have been able to get a good comparison between this unit and a jvc that's in my buick century. The panasonic looks better, especially in the given application (old cadillac) but is generally less functional. This is too bee expected because the jvc would have cost more money than the panasonic if I had bought it under normal conditions. But since I got the jvc as the new models were being stocked they both ended up being the same price.