Philips combines price, features and quality beautifully

Author's Rating:

Pros: Inexpensive without being cheap; flexible, capable and well-built

Cons: Only lacks the most advanced features available

The Bottom Line: 
For shoppers on a budget, this is the best combination of price, features and quality out there.

Author's Review
As I graduated from college, started a new job and moved into a new apartment, it quickly became necessary to purchase a goodly number of household items that were formerly outside of my purview. And I'll be honest: I'm a stereotypical male in many ways, and household items tend to bore me. But the big upside to all of this shopping was that I also got to run around and invest in some new electronics. I'm a guy; shopping for gadgets and toys tends to make me happy, and to alleviate a torturous day of purchasing small appliances, food and furnishings. So a trip to Best Buy closed one such day quite aptly, as I knew that our new entertainment center would need some, well, entertainment capabilities to make itself useful. So, after a brief stint of shopping, I picked up the Philips 727 DVD Player.

I had only a few criteria guiding my purchase decision, and this Philips player met each one quite capably. So here, in order, are the reasons I selected this player, and the reasons that it has lived up to the challenges I presented as a consumer:

Price
I like gadgets, and I like oodles of features, but I was also a recent graduate waiting on his first paycheck. I knew that I could spend a lot on a DVD player with lots of cool abilities that I would use infrequently, but I decided that doing so wasn't truly necessary for what would mostly be used for basic playback. The Philips player had all the capabilities I wanted (more on that below), and Best Buy had it on sale for a mere $80. This was a largely deterministic factor for me, and although it wasn't the cheapest player on the floor, it did seem to best combine its low price with size, quality and features.

Features
Most of the DVD players in this price range tended to be quite limited in terms of abilities. As I mentioned, I wasn't trying to be too greedy here, but I was exceptionally impressed that an $80 player could offer me all of the following:

- CD/CD-R/CD-RW/DVD-R/DVD-RW playback
- Support for VCD, SVCD, Audio CD, and MP3 CD formats
- Progressive Scan

That's an impressive set of features for a player so inexpensive, in my book. After testing the above features, I am indeed duly impressed with the player's flexibility and ease of use. Because my television is not an HDTV (another budget-based decision), I have not had the occasion to test Progressive Scan, but for any consumers who broke the bank buying an HDTV, this would be a well-recommended cost-saving measure -- this inexpensive player's ability to playback in Progressive Scan makes it quite worthwhile. The wide range of format compatibilities is nothing to shake a stick at in this price range, either.

Quality
The only DVD players priced lower than this one had one of two problems:

1) They came from an off-brand company and looked as though they were assembled from cheap, non-durable parts by a labor force that may or may not have included drunken monkeys, or

2) They came from a name-brand company, but were an obvious bottom-of-the-line player that lacked even the basic capabilities to play back VCD/SVCD formats, or even anything on a CD-R/DVD-R.

As alluded to earlier, it was the combination of features and price that drove me to the Philips 727 DVD Player, but it was also comforting that the player came from a respected brand with a tradition of quality (at least in my own experience). In addition, the floor model had a look of being tightly constructed, with a sleek, extremely compact design (the player is approximately two inches tall). Although that's a tough call to make while shopping, it seemed obvious to me that this player would prove more durable than its counterparts from Apex, with little difference in price and a mammoth list of abilities. So far, this estimation has proved entirely correct.


The Bottom Line Redux
I would emphatically recommend the Philips 727 DVD Player to anyone who asked me about it. To this day I am impressed by the quality and flexibility that the player has displayed relative to its price tag. To be honest, unless a shopper is looking for some heavy advancements like DVD-writing capability, I can't think of much reason to spend a dollar above the best price they could find on this player. It has met my needs and then some, and I have no reason to believe that it won't continue to do so for years to come.