Another Excellent Philips Product

Author's Rating:

Pros: Philips brand, many hookup options, nice remote

Cons: Bulky design, slow seeking speed, bad title displays with files burned discs

The Bottom Line: 
If you're looking for a great Philips DVD player, look no further than this excellent product.

Author's Review
Let me just start out by saying: I love Philips brand products. A good majority of the electronics products I and are Philips made. Not once have I ever had any sort of problem with any of their products. I, of course, also say this about Magnavox and Philips-Magnavox products as well. Just to give you an idea of how loyal I am I'll list all the Philips products I have owned:

This DVD724 DVD player
A DVP642 DVD player
A 20" Flat screen TV Model 20PT643R
A 240 Watt home stereo
A 330 Watt home stereo Model FW-C577
A 27" Magnavox TV w/ 100 Watt entertainment center
2 13" Magnavox TVs
...and a separate Philips subwoofer that I bought used from someone.
Soon I also plan to purchase a 30" Widescreen HDTV from Philips but I havn't decided which model to get

Anyway, on with the review.

DESIGN

This thing is pretty attractive. Coming with its sleek silver & grey color scheme, it blends well with the rest of my equipment. This unit is quite large, however, mostly in the horizontal plane. This wouldn’t be too bad but it’s about 2.5-3 inches in height as well. A bit large, but it still works for me.

Unlike my other DVD player, this player is completely silent and runs cool after a long playing session. You can hear the discs spinning and the unit gets hot in my other unit, but this player is fine in both regards.

One of the biggest events that happened with this player is when it got a little shock from me. I had walked up to the player to press a button when I gave it a static electricity shock from my finger right on to one of the buttons. After this incident, my player has never been the same. At the time, the shock caused the front digital display to just display gibberish numbers constantly and caused all the buttons on the front of the player to stop working. Fortunately, it was only those two things that were damaged in the shock. After days of messing with it, I finally figured out to go into the System Menu and press the Reset option. After doing that and turning it off and on again, everything was back to normal. Since that incident, I have shocked it a few more times (unintentionally, of course) and it has reset properly every time except for the On/Off switch. This player actually has a button that clicks on and off to actually cut the power instead of putting it into Standby mode. That button no longer works at all, but fortunately it is stuck in the On position. No other problems other than that. Very cool.

REMOTE CONTROL

Features on the remote are as follows:
- 0-9 buttons for seeking to specific chapters or to an exact time
- Standby button to shut the player off
- Display to show what Title and Chapter you are on and used to input a time to seek to using the 0-9 buttons
- Title & Menu buttons (I still don't know what the heck the difference is between them)
- System Menu to pull up the player settings menu
- Arrow and OK buttons for navigation around DVD menus
- Play, Stop, Pause, and Skip buttons for playback
- Subtitle to change subtitle displays on screen
- Angle seldom used but useful if playing concert DVDs and in some DVD extra features
- Zoom for zooming in on the playback picture at 2.0x and 4.0x magnifications using the Arrow buttons to move the view around the screen
- Audio for changing the audio track between spoken languages and channels
- Repeat for Chapter Repeat and Title Repeat
- Repeat A-B for repeating a scene of your choice by pressing it once for the beginning of a scene and again for the end of a scene
- Preview is only used when viewing JPEG images burned to a disc to see "thumbnails" of the pictures on the disc.
- Mute to mute the audio being played without pausing the video playback

Lots of stuff on the remote. Some of the buttons for the last eight buttons are pretty small for large fingers to press accurately, but it doesn't bother me.

OUTPUT & HOOKUPS

Whether you've got a top of the line A/V system or if you've just got a dinky little TV, this player should work with it all:

(One each)
Video - Component, S-Video, Composite
Audio - Coaxial, Optical, RCA

Coaxial and Optical digital connections are capable of outputting Dolby Digital Surround and DTS sound to a capable A/V receiver.

Personally, I use the component video and coaxial audio hookups to connect to my Pioneer receiver for my 20" TV and 5.1 channel audio system. Like with almost all DVD players, only composite video and RCA audio cables are included with the box, but I already had everything I needed so just a heads up to those of you starting your own home theater with all that fancy stuff.

Also, this player supports Progressive Scan output but only with HDTVs with a component video hookup, which I do not have yet.

FEATURES

First of all, you've got your standard DVD playback for playing movies and whatnot bought from a store or burned on a computer. Next, it plays pretty much any kind of media you can burn to a regular CD or DVD such as JPEG images, regular audio CDs, MP3 files, VCDs & SVCDs (Quick note: All this can be burned to either CD/DVD-R or CD/DVD-RW discs and played)

While I do not own a DVD burner, I have tested a few burned CDs to try out and I really haven’t had any problems with any of the playback with any of the options for audio or video playback.

Just a few gripes to mention about the player: First of all, when going through the menu system, choosing a file to play off of a burned disc, you can only read around 10 characters of the name of the file and then it cuts off. Also, there is no on-screen display of what you're actually watching or listening to when changing between files. Also, this player has only up to 8x fast forward and fast reverse. I had a really cheap player a long time ago that had 16x! Kinda cheap, but I can deal with that.

CLOSING STATEMENTS

I’m not sure if you’d be able to find any of these players still available in stores today, but check around eBay or other places but if you’re looking for a great Philips DVD player, look no further than this excellent product. I've had it for a couple years now and I don't plan on ever parting with it.

|||UPDATE|||

To answer a couple comments I received about this review: I happen to believe that video quality and audio quality come from the quality of the cables connected to the player, not the player itself. Because I used the best type of cables for audio (Coaxial/Optical) and video (Component), I can hear and see the my DVDs at their highest quality possible given my setup. The only limitation on this was the quality of the monitor and speakers used...and I really don't think I was reviewing those in this review.
For the record I use a 5.1 surround sound Sony speaker and Philips subwoofer setup hooked up to a 500W Pioneer A/V receiver for audio. For video I am using the Philips 20" flat screen CRT SDTV with component cable input.