I got my Yamaha DVD-S520 for Christmas 2002. It was purchased from Richer Sounds for £129.95 (plus £9.99 delivery), though nearly a year and a half on I imagine you might be able to pick one up a bit cheaper. I also paid a little extra to get the region free version of this player.
I had ... Read review
Advantages: Reliable, robust DVD player Disadvantages: Bit on the chunky side
I got my Yamaha DVD-S520 for Christmas 2002. It was purchased from Richer Sounds for £129.95 (plus £9.99 delivery), though nearly a year and a half on I imagine you might be able to pick one up a bit cheaper. I also paid a little extra to get the region free version of this player.
I had decided to get a DVD player after many months of attempting to watch films on my computer through the DVD-ROM drive. Due to some technical problem ... ...I decided on either this Yamaha DVD player or a Toshiba model. Due to the limited availability of the Toshiba in the run up to Christmas, I went for the Yamaha DVD-S520.
What can it do?
*****************
The player is capable of playing DVD, Video CD and regular CDs and I have used it to play all 3 without any problems. The player will also read CDs or DVDs containing MP3 encoded audio tracks but not being much ... more
I got my Yamaha DVD-S520 for Christmas 2002. It was purchased from Richer Sounds for £129.95 (plus £9.99 delivery), though nearly a year and a half on I imagine you might be able to pick one up a bit cheaper. I also paid a little extra to get the region free version of this player.
I had decided to get a DVD player after many months of attempting to watch films on my computer through the DVD-ROM drive. Due to some technical problem with my computer, I was unable to watch many films through to the end. This wasn’t even remedied after buying a hardware DVD decoder card, an extremely frustrating situation as you might imagine! It was time to cut my losses and buy a decent player. Due to space limitations in my mini Aladdin’s cave of a room, I wanted a DVD player that I’d be able to watch through the TV card of my computer, so it was important that it had an S-VHS output. Sound would be linked to the AUX socket on my hi-fi.
After looking through some consumer magazines, I decided on either this Yamaha DVD player or a Toshiba model. Due to the limited availability of the Toshiba in the run up to Christmas, I went for the Yamaha DVD-S520.
What can it do? *****************
The player is capable of playing DVD, Video CD and regular CDs and I have used it to play all 3 without any problems. The player will also read CDs or DVDs containing MP3 encoded audio tracks but not being much of a music downloader I haven’t needed to try this out.
The picture quality on this compares well with other DVD players I have experienced, and this player has been used both through our large TV downstairs (before the parents bought their player) and through my monitor. At a push I would say that the picture quality is marginally less crisp than on the more expensive player we have downstairs. Very occasionally, the player skips or displays errors (coloured lines) during playback of a DVD. On replaying the section of the disc often the error does not occur, this is perhaps something to do with the error buffer. These minor glitches happen infrequently (certainly not on every DVD) so do not adversely affect the viewing experience.
I have used this to view a VCD only once, and can confirm that it plays these without any trouble. This format never really made it to the United Kingdom at least as far as commercially released films are concerned. It is unlikely that most users will need to use this function very often, if at all. My copy of Planet of the Apes (picked up in Singapore airport) works fine though!
A good feature on this player is that it automatically bookmarks the last 5 discs that were played, so if viewing is interrupted by a surprise visit from Aunty Ethel, play can be resumed where you left off by pressing the resume button (on the remote). These are stored in the memory when the player is on standby.
Sound ********
The front of the DVD player advertises the fact that it has TruSurround by SRS and Dolby digital, I have not made full use of this but the sound is great in stereo when amplified through my hi-fi. There is also an output for a subwoofer, which again I haven’t tried and imagine my family are glad of! Unlike some more advanced DVD players this does not have outputs for 5.1 surround sound.
Sound quality is also good when playing audio CDs through the player, which also handles some of my more scratched discs very well.
Ease of use/controls ***********************
The front panel of the player has few buttons, on/off, open/close, play, stop, fast-forward, rewind and pause. The more complicated functions are controlled via the remote control and the set-up options using onscreen menus. There is an accompanying manual (18 pages in English) that explains in a fairly straightforward way, how to do things such as change the output from PAL to NTSC, the aspect ratio, zoom in/out and even some other functions to do with karaoke. It did however take me a while to figure out how to set the output to auto, which allows the player to alter the output accordingly depending on the format of the disc being played.
The controller is fairly compact and moderately easy to lose, have had to hunt around for it while writing this review. The keypad is fairly simple and remains uncluttered by loads of buttons for functions you might never use, which adds to the simplicity of operation.
Appearance **************
The player itself is fairly blocky by today’s standards and measures 9 cm high, 43.5 cm wide, 31.4 cm deep and weighs just over 3 Kg. The finish is made to look like brushed chrome. It is a fairly average looking machine.
Outputs *********
SCART, S-Video, video (composite), audio (left and right channels), subwoofer and digital out (x2).
Summary ***********
This is a good functional DVD player, with robust playback and a few extra functions. It does enough to keep me happy and the main advantage is that it can output to PAL from NTSC discs so that I can play multi-region discs on my PAL television, oh and of course that I can watch films all the way through everytime!
