Yamada DVX-6600

I've been playing with our new DVD player that arrived on Thursday, and so far I'm pretty happy. First impression was that it was very pretty device - about an inch slimmer than our previous Sony. Especially the disk tray is ultra-thin - just slightly thicker than a CD, which makes it a bit flimsy... but so far no actual problems with it. Remote control is bulky, buttons require a firm push before they work, and buttons could have been laid out thinking about the usability a bit more.

The player seems to have some difficulties communicating with our widescreen Sony TV. It seems to indicate to the TV that the format is always widescreen - which results to distorted picture if the ratio is 4:3. Not too big of a problem, as I can always adjust this manually with the TV remote, just annoying. There is an options menu on the device, but setting the TV display format didn't change anything. I emailed Umax about this issue on Friday - to which they promptly replied - and there is hope of getting this fixed. My guess is that it's a compatibility issue with the TV.

But that's all really besides the point. I was most interested how the picture quality of this budget device would compare against our old top of the range Sony. And wow - I'm not an expert on this subject, but with DVD-playback I couldn't really see any difference on our 36" widescreen TV compared to the old player: picture was smooth and clear. This morning I tried out the other selling point of this player - the possiblity to play other format video files. Watched couple of episodes of Jeremiah that were encoded using Xvid, and I was quite happy. Picture and sound quality were good, and mostly smooth - sometimes there was slight jerkyness to the picture but not to distraction. Had a brief look at some Divx encoded files too, and although with some of them I had to manually adjust the TV display, they were pretty good quality too. If you're interested on what kind of encodings this player supports, VCDRookie has a fairly comprehensive list on the subject (on the second page of the review). You're bound to find some encodings that won't work, but mostly it's all good.

All in all, I think this player is very good value for money. It's not as polished experience as a more expensive device would be, but that shouldn't be expected for £77.