I bought this at £109 delivered from LASKYS.com back in July 2007. No kidding I am one of those people who keep records of purchases - receipts if bought from shops, electronic invoices if bought via the internet. At that time, both Argos and Amazon are selling this machine but at a higher price £120-130.
The reason for this purchase was that we were going for long car journeys on a regular basis. To keep the kid entertained while one of us can have a rest, this is the ideal gadget to have in the car. Also, it is useful for a caravan holiday when it is raining and there is no DVD player in the caravan.
Since this is a portable 7" DVD player, I would not expect Dolby surround sound and cinematic picture quality. Also, it should be relatively simple to set up and use especially for a kid. It has all the basic features and a bit more - an USB port for pen drives so that you can either use it to play movies stored on the pen drive or do a slideshow on pictures stored in the pen drive.
Well occasionally when I or my kid want to watch a DVD and my Mrs/I wants to watch TV at home. This is a simple solution to satisfy both parties.
Setup and Usage:
This is more or less a switch on and play player. However make sure the DVD/VCD/CD is properly 'clicked' into the anchor (you may need to push it a bit) otherwise you can't play the media and generate a lot of spinning noise instead. Navigation of the index is very easy, even a little kid can do it.
To convert it into region free, DO NOT follow those 'open the tray' instructions on the net as this is a PET730/05 machine. Those open the tray first instructions will never work! Instead just press 'setup', V (down arrow), V, > (right arrow), enter 212225, < (left arrow), V. It will show the region code as 2 on screen. If there is no region code displayed, try the sequence again. Enter 0 to make it region free. Press setup again to finish. There is NO need to open the tray. I have done mine this way. Source: Videohelp.com.
Look and feel:
The appearance is pleasant and sytlish however it is a bit heavy. When it plays the movies or does a slidshow. The picture quality is quite good and sound quality is quite good as well. Of course, use earphones or headphones when you are using it in a moving car. The Zero Bright Dot screen does work - good on screen contrast
Media handling:
This player can handle CD-R; CD-RW (surprisingly); DVD+/-R (Tesco, BenQ, Maxell), Verbatim DVD+RW, definitely not Imation DVD+RW and DVD-RW unless they are turned into ROM.
For media files, the usual MPEG-1, MPEG-2, DiVX. For MPEG-4 files, only in .AVI or .DIV formats. .mp4 files are invisible to this player. Renaming .mp4 files to .avi files will not trick this player into playing them. To overcome this, use the free Pazera MP4toAVI converter to convert these .mp4 files to .avi files. The converted files are of simiar sizes.
Definitely no: .rm, .rmvb and .mp4 files even it is MPEG-4 compatible.
Priority:
When you plug a pen drive into the USB port, it will take the priority over whatever that is in the DVD drive. Only the directory of the pen drive will show. Once you unplug the pen drive, the index of the DVD will automatically appear after the DVD is read.
Battery life:
It only last for 3 hours and a bit. After almost two years of regular use, a fully charged battery can only last for 2.5 hours.
In general, this is a good value for money player. It checks all the basic feature boxes and it can be converted into a region free player. The picture and sound quality are very reasonable if not pretty good for that price.
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