 The device is easy to install, outlets are well la ... Strengths: Huge library, reads many formats, good picture and sound quality, easy setup, region lock
Weaknesses: Disk loader unreliable, no emergency handling, menus too slow, primitive remote, no clock, no autotimer
Summary: The device is easy to install, outlets are well labeled, the documentation is all right.
The picture and sound quality is certainly good enough for 99% of all potential buyers. DTS is supported.
The device reads numerous media. Movies on DVD as well as VCD are supported. Audio CD's, including MP3, are supported, although MP3 files on DVD are not accessable (sadly only on CD).
Buyers of international movies will be hit by the DVD region mafia methods. The player can play movies from one region only. So much about fair trade and free speech.
The software of this device is of very poor quality. It is not just a primitive CPU at fault here. The menus are too slow. Information (e.g. "flip" disk) gets lost. Sometimes the menu would produce only the background color with a frame, but no other information. In this case the user has to turn off the device and reset it by turning it on again. There are also insufficient possibilities to interrupt an action, for example if the loading mechanism fails (see below), after startup, or just to get the menu when the player thinks it should start a DVD (happens every time during startup and between movies, no matter what the settings are, annoying). The device has no timed auto-shutdown, no start timer, no clock (would require additional $1 clock IC). The title field in the menu for each disk is too short, especially for multi-title DVD's or double-sided disks with different titles on each side (e.g. double-sided DVD-R media). You can also store only one picture per disk, although the player can flip each disk. The player has no option to automatically continue a movie on the second side of a flip disk, it always grabs the next disk instead.
So far I had two disks which would actually freeze the entire device while playing a movie. This is even more serious than slow, low quality menus.
The most important design feature of this device is the library with its disk loader. Unfortunately the loader fails about once every fourth time, and depending on the load of the library, the disk distribution and whether a disk is located between two other disks or not, there are regions where the mechanism cannot load any disk reliably! Even perfect leveling of the device does not help (shelves can be tilted a bit). Different media, same result. Once one of my disks got stuck while loading and the drive then tipped all my 200+ disks like a domino game. The disk carousel then ran over all disks, scratching them with the carousel's bottom disk slots. And there was no possibility to turn off the device and then turn it on again to open the door without starting the carousel automatically every time. In fact, the door would not open at all, only with force by hand. These are really a major design flaws which blow every DVD experience with this gadget. And they can become quite expensive.
Until the serious issues are fixed think twice before you buy this player or any of its successors.
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