I recently (October 2005) bought this player so I could play back discs I'd recorded on my Liteon LVW05005 “All write” recorder, as it claims to support plus and minus rewriteable discs (which it does), amongst various disc formats.
Supported formats
- DVD video discs
- DVD-R video discs
- DVD+R video discs
- DVD-RW video discs
- DVD+RW video discs
- Audio compact discs
- Kodak picture CD
- Discs of JPEG images
- Discs with MP3 files
It's a cheap unit (I paid $AU56 for it), with reasonable picture quality. It's quiet, stays cool (all the time, including while in use). It has composite video, S-Video, and component video outputs. Stereo audio and digital audio out (electrical, not optical). About the only gripes I about it are that it:
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It has no resume feature. You can't even go into stand-by, then later resume playback; never mind turn the player off, or take a disc out, and then resume playing it later.
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If you leave the player on pause or stop for long enough, it locks up and will not start playing again. You need to eject and reload the disc, or hope that pressing the menu button will cause it to load up the main disc menu. In any event, you'll lose your place on the disc.
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It needs the remote (there's only power, eject, play/pause, and stop buttons on the main unit), and the remote isn't set out too well—you have to look for the buttons you want to press (e.g. you can't intuitively press fast-forward then move your thumb over to press play, or quickly find the pause button).
Otherwise, the remote's not too bad—unlike some units, you don't have to aim at the player with precision; though you do still have to aim it at the box. My old TV remote can be used anywhere in the room, and without aiming at the set, you can just leave it on the arm of your chair while you press a button—this sort of convenience seems to be missing on remote controls for recent devices.