Maxim MX11-21

Author's product rating:   

Picture Playback	Good
Sound Level	Good
Range of Features	Above Average
Durability	Very Poor
Value for Money	Poor

Advantages:	Inexpensive .
Disadvantages:	Sometimes works and sometimes does not .

Recommend to potential buyers:

no

Full review

We purchased the player for our daughters birthday at the begining of Februay this year.It was very reasonably priced at only £25 and we were not looking to aquire anything too extravagent, our daughter is not yet old enough to be interested in special features, sound quality and the like just yet.

DVD PLAYER APPEARANCE AND OPERATIONS.
The player itself does look very smart.It has a highly polished silver front with manual buttons to enable you to:
1.Switch the machine on and off.
2.Open and close the disc drawer.
3.Play/ Pause.
4.Stop.
5.Prev.(Which means skip back to the preceding segment of the dvd).
6.Next.(To skip to the following segment of the dvd).

The rear of the player is labeled to facilitate easy installation.The player does have a scart socket as well as audio output connections.It also has a seperate video outlet and a coaxial socket.

REMOTE CONTROL.
The romote at first glance does seem to have an excessive number of buttons.As you would expect, you have the standard choices, including all the operations you can perform with the display at the front of the machine.It also has operations such as zoom, bookmark, repeat and tuning options.
You also get an option to choose which language you view subtitles in, including Chinese, Japenese, French, Spanish, German, Portugese, Italian and good old English.If the disc you are playing is compatible you can also change the language that is being spoken on-screen to the above mentioned options plus any extras included on the disc itself.

USER MANUAL.
The manual is clearly writen and easy to understand.It informs you of every aspect of installation, use and features of the unit.It also has a trouble shooting section at the back to try and help with minor faults.Included with this was a guarantee card that covered the player for 12 months.

INSTALLATION.
I could lie and say that it was as easy as pie.For myself it actually was.My husband does anything technical around the home as he seems to show a greater affinity to the tasks.

I can say in truth that he was upstairs for only about 5 minutes.When i consulted him to write this review i was told it was only a matter of following the labels on the back of the unit and even i could have done it.I was rather insulted, but it will give an idea as to how easy it apparently was.

EXTRA FEATURES.
As mentioned above, the player offers alternative languages.

This unit also displays JPEG picture disks, which it automatically finds when this type of disk is inserted.The picture quality is quite good as we have tried it out with several volumes of family pics.

The unit will play music disks too.The sound is of reasonable quality, but as my daughter only plays such jems as Spice Girls or Sugarbabes at eardrum bursting levels, maybe my opinion is a little biased.

SUMMARY.
Now To The Problems.
We were quite suprised when we first purchased it as to how good the player was.The picture quality when watching a film was just as good as our expensive main player and with dolby sound, the audio was of good standard too.

To my shame i did not send off the guarantee card.Hindsight is a wonderfull thing.
Around the begining of May the player ceased to function altogether.We had no prior warning, no skipping disks or distorted sound.The unit had not been damaged in any way or tampered with by curious little fingers.We had also purchased it with cash and with no sign of the reciept, we were rather stuck as to what to do.
On the plus side, as our daughter is only quite young, she does not have viewing privileges every night, so we did not have any immediate rush to purchase a replacement.
We tried the player several times over the next few weeks.The weather was rather warm and i think we had hopes that it just had heat stroke.Nothing changed.
We worked around the loss of Scooby Doo at weekends with videos for our daughter and decided we would replace it eventually as busy parents do.
One night i tried the player out of curiosity, and hey presto it worked.I could only conclude that the repair faries had visited in the middle of the night with tiny screwdrivers and took pity on us.

Now the player works intermittently, true more often than not, but i can never predict when.We could of course replace it, but we never seem to get around to it.We could also have it looked at, but for the cost it is not worth it.
The moral of the story is, send off the paperwork and keep the receipt.If you like mystery and uncertainty, this is the player for you.I like to know i can get my fix of Scooby and will be purchasing a different player.When i get the time of course.