Sony DVP NS 38

When my trusty old DVD player finally died, I bought the Sony DVP-NS38 B as its replacement for approximately £60.

My requirements for a DVD player were extremely basic: I wanted an entry level multi-region DVD player. So I headed off to my local Richer Sounds and had a look at the two or three that satisfied my requirements and didn't look too flimsy and picked the one that they happened to have in stock.

According to the manual, as well as commercial DVDs, this model supports a variety of different formats: DVD-RW/-R, DVD+RW/+R/+R DL, Video CD, Music CD and CD-RW/-R.

The DVD player is very thin, meaning that not many buttons or controls fit on it, and the LED display is very small and does not contain a lot of information. In terms of outputs - it has a digital audio coax and a SCART socket.

On the front of the case there are the following buttons: standby, open/close, play and stop. With the number of DVDs that require menu selection, the lack of up/down buttons is frustrating as it means that the DVD can't be played without the control.

The case is black and sleek-looking and fits in well with the VCR and cable TV box. It appears to be fairy sturdy, although at under 2kg it is not too heavy.

The remote control is fairly complicated with many different buttons and I am constantly left looking for the right one! When pressing the arrow buttons on the remote control, e.g. to change to a different track, it frequently skips ahead more than one step, which can be annoying, particularly when the colour contrast between the selected and unselected items is not very great, because this means that it is very hard to see what is selected.

The picture quality of the playback of commercial DVDs is great; I've tried it with both region 2 and 4 DVDs. As well as playing DVDs, there are dozens of other functions (many of which only make sense if you're listening to music or looking at pictures) - for example creating a play list, A-B repeat, sharpening pictures, shuffling tracks, parental locks etc. My personal favourite is playing the DVD in slow play or fast play mode - the picture and sound are sampled so that the voices sound at normal pitch, just speeded up or slowed down. Watching speeded up version of films is highly amusing.

As well as the functions I've listed, it does have a lot of other options, most of which have to be accessed through several layers of menus. Simply watching a DVD is straightforward, but you can do so much more if you are prepared to read the manual.

In conclusion, this player is not too expensive, is great for watching DVDs and multi-region comes as standard. A second remote control with fewer buttons that just let you do the basic play functions would be a big benefit through!

(NB This review is crossposted from dooyoo.com)