UMAX DVX-6100

Author's product rating:   

Picture Playback	Excellent
Sound Level	Excellent
Range of Features	Excellent
Durability	Excellent
Value for Money	Excellent

Advantages:	Plays Everything, Cheap
Disadvantages:	Cheap looking remote

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

The Umax/Yamada DVX 6100 is one of the early Divx players to hit the market here in the UK. The first was the KISS range of Divx player, the 6100 has one major advantage over the Kiss player, it’s price. At a shade under £80 this player represents excellent value for money.

For a start it’s looks are more than adequate, the player is slim and has a smart silver finish. The remote looks cheap, but I use a universal remote so it wasn’t an issue for me. The player has an annoying animation of a spinning disc when playing a DVD which can be mildly distracting. But all in all it looks the part.

The DVD playing back is excellent, I’ve never known this player to refuse a DVD or even pause midway through a film. I’ve heard reports that this player is region 0 (it will play any region) I have not verified this. The sound is excellent and this player will more than meet all your needs as a DVD player. But we didn’t just buy this player for its DVD playback now did we? You could have bought a supermarket DVD player for £34 that would achieve similar results, so what do you get for the extra money?

Divx is a highly compressed video format. Normal DVD’s are several GB in size, using Divx a whole DVD can be compressed into 700mb (the size of a CD). The end sound and picture quality is usually excellent (near DVD quality). For example if you have broadband the files size is so small you could compress your home family holiday DVD down to just 600mb and transmit the file over the Internet to your cousin in Australia without the need of paying the postage or using up a blank DVD. Obviously I would never condone the sharing of copyrighted materials with others.

So in short the 6100 allows you to play your Divx files on your TV in your living room instead of just on your PC upstairs. Sure there are other ways of doing this (using TV out cables or wireless video senders) but they all lead to unacceptable sound and video quality loss.

But Divx isn’t all it does it plays pretty much everything: Windows Media Files, MP3, SVCD, VCD, MPEG, VOB, AVI etc.

If you burn the files onto a DVD it doesn’t take a genius to work out you can create a library of content on just one DVD. When you pop the disc into the player it brings up a handy menu which allows you to browse the content of is disk, it even allows you to use folders on the disc.

The 6100 is easy to update, Umax regularly release firmware updates which keep the player compatible with most of the latest codecs (used to encode video). You just burn the update onto a CD and pop it in the player and it updates itself quite easily.

My only complaint with the player is that occasionally after finishing watching a Divx file the player can freeze to a black screen instead of returning to the menu. This is fixed by turning the player on and off and it only happens occasionally. I have found the playback of all formats on this player is impeccable.

So in short if you think Divx is your “bag” then I would definitely recommend this player. I would like to see future versions of this player with perhaps an integrated hard disc, a wireless network card and a DVD writer. I believe that Kiss are already selling a Divx player that has some of these features, so maybe the competition is hoting up.

I got mine from Amazon for £79.99 including free delivery.

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