9 out of 9 people found this review helpful.
Nice DVD Player but NO DIVX in US or Canada
Date of Review: Sep 9, 2005
The Bottom Line: Nice DVD Player, but check out other offerings and make sure you get what is important to you!
I picked this up to go with my new Samsung HLR-4264W DLP TV and was fairly impressed by the results.
Picture and speed of the DVD player were very nice through the HDMI cable but the up-conversion aspect of the player was a little underwhelming. Don't get me wrong there is a slight difference and the RCA DVD player that it replaced was about 4 years old and non-progressive scan so it was time to upgrade anyway, but with a good TV my guess is that you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference between up-conversion or just a nice progressive scan player.
BUT!!! - You do get bragging rights with up-conversion... :)
Key Points….
This player can not play Divx files, even though many reviews talk about it, the US and Canadian Versions do not have that ability. I've looked for updates and such and for all intensive purposes I couldn't find anything that sounded promising, so if Divx is important don't bother….
One other thing that I was a little disappointed in was the fact the for the surround sound capabilities of this unit you have to have a digital input on your receiver, our older Pioneer only had discreet inputs (One input for each speaker) so we were out of luck there as well, but most newer receivers have the digital inputs.
The last issue I had with the player was how dark "darker scenes" were in movies, now this could be my settings as I didn't spend a whole lot of time messing around with the settings so this may or may no able to be adjusted to more pleasing results.
Don't get me wrong overall this is a decent DVD player and does have a lot of bells and whistles, but I do recommend purchasing from a store with a good return policy so that if you decide to try something else you can swap it.
Which is what I decided to do, and I opted to trade it for the LG LDA-531. (Check out the review on that one too!)
The things that I really liked about this player were the following…
1) Same brand as TV, not that that really matters
2) HDMI Cable included in the box – just a cheap one 20-30 dollar value
3) Remote is very nice to use, and responsive
Many people will be very happy with this, and it is a very good DVD player, but for my desires I opted for one with more of the options that I wanted.
