Alba DVD59

...3-years warranty on my new Alba DVD player will bump up the price by £99.90, at a rate of £33.30 per annum

PROBLEM?

Well, the Alba DVD59 of which I write (I will eventually - honest!) cost me £32.99 from Homebase. As it comes with a one year warranty, I could buy a new one every year, and still have it work out cheaper than the extended warranty.

All of this goes to show just how cheap DVD players can ...
...latest bit of kit, the Alba DVD59 can only cost £32.99 p.a. – I know that in advance; after all it costs that and comes with a one-year warranty! If it makes it beyond the year, this could be £18 p.a. let’s say. I see from other reviewers' ops that it may be cheaper still in Argos!

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

“Ooh, slim isn’t it?” When you slide the Alba out of its perfectly adequate packaging, the first thing that strikes you ... more

The Prologue – Never Say Never Again. Only in November was I promising to write no more home cinema/TV opinions, having filled my hi-fi rack to brimming, and now it’s starting all over again thanks to the ageing process (the equipment’s, not mine)!

……and now back to the plot.

Here’s a good example of vain hope in action.

“ALBA Vision – Your Guarantee plus up to 3 years protection against unexpected repair bills”.

If I take up this magnanimous offer, an additional 3-years warranty on my new Alba DVD player will bump up the price by £99.90, at a rate of £33.30 per annum

PROBLEM?

Well, the Alba DVD59 of which I write (I will eventually - honest!) cost me £32.99 from Homebase. As it comes with a one year warranty, I could buy a new one every year, and still have it work out cheaper than the extended warranty.

All of this goes to show just how cheap DVD players can be these days.

My first Sony cost me £350, and uncharacteristically for a Sony product, only lasted 2 years. Cost of owning a DVD player = £175 p.a.

My Yelo 800 (who?) cost me £155 and has now lasted 3 years almost, of heavy use. It now makes a noise and has started getting fussy about what it will and won’t play, hence the swap-out. Cost of owning a DVD player = £60 p.a.

This latest bit of kit, the Alba DVD59 can only cost £32.99 p.a. – I know that in advance; after all it costs that and comes with a one-year warranty! If it makes it beyond the year, this could be £18 p.a. let’s say. I see from other reviewers' ops that it may be cheaper still in Argos!

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

“Ooh, slim isn’t it?” When you slide the Alba out of its perfectly adequate packaging, the first thing that strikes you is how dinky it is, and for the price, the build-quality feels exceptionally good.

The front panel is mirror-finished interrupted only by a diminutive slot for the DVD itself and an on-off switch, which glows a probably too bright blue when in stand-by mode. Initially, the mirror finish is guarded by a peel-off film which may lead you to think that yours is dusty or corroded in some way until you remove it.

In a machine so slim (it’s only 45 mm high) there is no frontal display of track numbers and the like. Of course, if your player is to be under the telly, this could advantageous, especially when viewing in the dark.

If you intend stacking this along with other bits of kit, it’s probably best to keep it at the top of the pile, as the top lip of the case carries some buttons (eject, play, menu etc) which could become hidden if something else is stacked on top. I still find it quite convenient when loading a disk to press the Open/Close button on the machine, so that by the time I’ve remembered where the bloody remote control is, it’s ready to play.

The disc tray, when ejected, is clear acrylic, and whilst somewhat floppy, probably a damned sight less brittle than some I’ve encountered.

Of course, like most cheap volume-produced electronics that are no longer ‘state-of-the-art’ it’s made in China and re-badged. I think I’ve also seen it as a Bush.

The remote control is a somewhat chunkier affair, but reassuringly ‘hand-sized’ and comes with its first set of batteries. Its most important keys, relating to disc functions are slightly luminous, for those that like the 'sitting in the back row in the dark' effect.

To make it even better value-for-money, it actually comes complete with its own SCART lead, which could quite often cost you an extra fiver on some dearer machines.

The width just happens to be the same as for my Sky set-top* box and my new Humax Freeview PVR. The mirrored finish compliments the latter almost perfectly, making them look like they’re part of a co-ordinated system.

(*I wonder just how many ‘STBs’ really ARE put on top of the set?)

CONNECTIONS

Of course, this is speeded up by the fact that you don’t have to dive out to Dixons or the Maplin shop to buy a SCART** lead before they close – great if being unwrapped on Christmas Day.

(**Incidentally, SCART stands for "Syndicat des Constructeurs d'Appareils Radiorécepteurs et Téléviseurs" - no wonder they're also known are Euroconnectors)

The all-important rear panel has most of the connections you’d ever need. There’s a SCART socket capable of carrying three grades of picture standard; in order of quality, these being Composite, S-Video and RGB. Basically Composite is a mere 2-wire connection carrying the whole picture signal, S-Video is a four-wire affair which separates (hence the S) the luminance and chrominance of a picture, and RGB is a six-wire affair with one pair for each primary colour, hence the Red, Green, Blue. To paraphrase George Orwell - Four wires (and six) good, two wires bad.

Basically, find out what’s the best your TV SCART input can handle and set it to that in the Alba’s set-up menu.

Besides being carried on the SCART output, sound is also provide for separately, both as a stereo pair of the now universal ‘phono’ plugs in red and white, and as a separate digital ‘co-axial’ SPDIF*** plug to carry the 5.1 channel sound from a Dolby Digital DVD to a suitable digital processor/amplifier. There’s also a real S-video socket for those that prefer the little 4-pin plugs. In fact, just about the only omission is an optical version of the digital sound output. Fortunately, most home cinema amps either cater for both, as does my Yamaha or only for the co-axial version.

(*** Sony/Philips Digital Interface)

SETTING UP

Having wired it up, there are a few little things to do to make sure that you’re getting the best from the machine, all of which involve accessing the set-up menu.

VIDEO OUTPUT - As I’ve mentioned before, you should try to set the best of the video output qualities that your TV will stand.

TV TYPE - If your TV can also accept an NTSC (the American standard) 525-line picture, then the output can be left to ‘Auto’, If it can’t, change the setting to PAL. This will force a reformatting of a US disk’s output to suit the European PAL standard. Because of a difference in the frames-per-second rate between PAL and NTSC, this can lead to slight jerkiness, so only use this option if a) you’ve got US/Canadian disks and b) if your TV doesn’t play NTSC.

TV DISPLAY – If you have a wide screen telly, tell the menu. If you only have a 4:3 conventionally shaped TV, you can choose ‘Normal/Letterbox’ or ‘Normal/Pan&Scan’. The former puts a wide screen picture on your TV in all its glory, but in a thin slot across the middle of the screen with those infuriating black bars top and bottom, whereas the latter does a ‘tele/cine’ conversion to produce a full 4:3 picture by keeping the action central to the screen, but this doesn’t however work with all DVDs. I know it does with ‘Elizabeth’ with Cate Blanchett but it’s very luck-of-the-draw as to whether they’ve bothered to format the disk in such a way.

WILL IT PLAY MY AMERICAN DISKS?

Initially, yes and no. Yes it will play NTSC format films, but no, out of the box, it won’t play Region 1 movies. The rear of the case does in fact bear the Region 2 logo. However, as with most re-badged Chinese-sourced DVD players, it can be ‘hacked’ at software level to do what it’s told.

This is an easy hack.

Turn it on, press the Open/Close button so that the tray opens.

Press the ‘PROG’ button

Press the ‘ENTER’ button three times.

A list of regions appears. Scroll down to the desired region; in most cases it’s OK to leave it set to Region 0 so that it’s effectively ‘Region-Free’ from now on.

Press the ‘STOP’ button and you’re away!

The 'Region-Free’ setting works in most case, but you do get the odd US disk with RCE (Regional Code Enhancement), which requires the setting to be changed to the actual Region 1 to make it playable. Fortunately, out of my 300-odd DVDs including many Region 1 examples, only one of mine is like this.

WHAT ELSE WILL IT PLAY

You can break this down into file types and media types.

Firstly, the file types;

DVD movies

CD audio but not the hi-definition S-ACD format,

Kodak PhotoCD

Music CD-ROMs with either MP3 or WMA file types on board. Curiously, the instruction book will only lay claim to WMA files, not MP3

CD-ROMs of JPEG files. I prefer these to the shop-bought Kodak PhotoCD if the truth is known, since I can correct the portrait/landscape orientation BEFORE I commit them to disk, whereas with the Kodak effort, you have to keep hitting the ‘Rotate’ cursor whenever a portrait format crops up.

The fact that many of these formats are ‘home’ productions augurs well for the machine’s tolerance of different media, and so far, this prognosis is holding up well.

I can definitely confirm that along with shop-bought disks, all manner of ‘burned’ media seem to work too.

CD-ROM, CD-R, CD-RW

DVD-R and DVD+RW, although there are permutations I’ve not tried yet, like a massive DVD-R disk full of MP3 files.

It does however seem unable, or unwilling to take previous video formats to heart, like VCD or S-VCD, but now that I can create my own DVDs, I’m couldn’t care less.

PLAYBACK QUALITY

Picture is excellent in both the S-Video and RGB settings – I can’t bring myself to use the Composite setting, it’s like going back to watching tapes.

Sound CDs sound fine too, but thanks to the lack of display on the front panel, need the TV on to navigate them. I shan’t be getting rid of my CD player just yet, and anyway, there’s always a niggling doubt that something so versatile can’t be best at everything - well not at £33 it can’t! ‘Jack Of All Trades’ and all that………

The playback of MP3 and WMA files depends largely on their initial sampling rate when ‘ripped’ to disk, so commenting on its playback quality of these compressed formats is difficult.

THE BAD NEWS

The lack of a track information display on the machine itself is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it’s less distracting whilst watching a DVD, but it does mean that you need the TV on just to navigate sound disks.

The instruction manual is hardly a model of correct or even meaningful English. At one point I thought that a ‘polarisedor’ was a Spanish sun-glasses maker until I realised that it was the two words ‘polarised or’. Had the latter even made sense, I might have spotted it earlier.

Controlling the machine via the remote control needs a fairly full-on view of the machine, which means that I may have to rethink the position of mine vis-à-vis the sofa - at present, I sit nearly at right-angles to the machine whilst it sits within my hi-fi rack, and there is no amount of stretching that will make it answer the helm.

It’s an Alba

THE GOOD NEWS

It’s only £32.99 at Homebase including the SCART lead (£39.99 at Amazon.co.uk)

It’s attractive (well I think so) and seemingly well made.

Good playback quality.

At least Alba have got a web-site!.

 

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