I joined Epinions today. I’ve always found their reviews to be kind of obnoxious because people get very wordy and cute with their reviews. But I think there is some value to them as well because they keep reviews of older products on record whereas Amazon has no reason to keep reviews of out-of-date electronics. Anyway, my DVD player died (while watching my Seinfeld DVD Christmas present!) so I decided to review it. You can go there to read the review or read it here:
Nice player but died early
Dec 26 ’04
Author’s Product Rating
Product Rating: 2.0
Sound: 4
Ease of Use: 3
Picture Quality: 4
Durability: 2
Pros
Good picture quality, disk compatibility, 5.1 audio out
Cons
Died after only 2 years of light to medium use
Full Review
I bought this to replace a Sony DVD player that died while under extended warranty and had to be replaced. I was looking for a DVD player that had 5.1 Surround Sound out since my receiver was Surround “ready” and couldn’t do the decoding on its own. I really didn’t have any problems with the picture quality and overall performance of the player. The warranty is not very good: 1 year for parts, but only 90 days for labor. If you’ve ever taken something in you will realize that that means they can charge you whatever they want for the repair and call it “labor” even if the unit is dead.
The player did well from the time I bought it in September 2002 until today when I got an ERROR H02 and it stopped playing any kind of disk entirely. Apparently H02 means go buy a new DVD player. While the unit is out of warranty and out of extended warranty now, I don’t think a little over 2 years is acceptable. After some research on the internet it seems a lot of people have been victims of the same error.
Recommended
No
Amount Paid (US$): 200.38
To read the review on ePinions, I had to register (or fishback did.) I then had to say I trust brted because by default you were not trusted. Perhaps as more people trust you, you become default trusted. You should post a review of your and my original portable Sony player. They’ve lasted forever.
They have lasted forever, though sometimes now I have to hit the buttons a few different ways to make them work. That’s why I don’t understand why I’ve had two DVD players go bad. My first DVD player was a Sony that cost $229. It failed a year later and was the only thing ever covered by my gold card automatically doubling the warranty. They agreed to pay up to that cost for any other DVD player so I got the Panasonic for free. By then I could get a progressive scan player and still it was less than the original at $200. Consumer Reports ranks Panasonic DVD players as the most reliable followed by Sony. I guess they are right since the Panasonic last six months longer than the Sony.
I have already started researching new DVD players and even visited Best Buy and Target tonight. I probably would have bought a new Sony except the in-store price on the model I was looking at was $30 higher than the online price and it turned out not to have 5.1 audio out (DVP-NS575). Then I found one online from Circuit City that looked good and was $22 cheaper than Best Buy but people on Amazon said it would freeze (DVP-NS775). Then I found a similar model with no reported freezing (DVP-NC875) that holds 5 DVD’s. It turns out Sony even makes a player that holds 300 DVD’s and/or CD’s. That was how I wound up at epinions.
Anyway, interesting follow-up. I found a discussion area where a guy said you could “push start” the DVD drive motor to overcome the H02 error. With nothing to lose I took the cover off the DVD player and gave the disc a little push after the drawer was pushed in. It worked! I don’t know how much longer it will work and I left the cover unscrewed but at least it got me through the rest of Seinfeld Season 1.
Long term follow-up: Over a year since I push started the DVD player, it is still working without any problems.
Conclusion: I have just replaced this DVD player with a Blu-ray player. I think the DVD motor got stuck once or twice more, but I was able to push-start it again and it continued to work. So I got four more years of use out of it.