Philips PET824 8.5-Inch Portable DVD / DivX Player by Philips
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Digital camera reviews of Philips PET824 8.5-Inch Portable DVD / DivX Player
Digital camera Review: A Philips vs. Panasonic shoot-out---the winner is?
Summary: 3 Stars
I have a Panasonic LX-8 that costed me nearly twice the price of the Philips unit. The Panasonic has been showing its age so I tried to save some money and got this little Philips unit. So how does it compare to its bigger Asian brother, you ask? First, the Philips unit is attractive to the eye before opening it up. However, the reduction in size of the screen of the Philips unit compared to the Panasonic unit is dramatic, terrible--even though it is suppose to be only a half inch smaller. Construction is worst on the Philips besides the well documented noisy feature of the Philip's drive that is probably blown out of proportion when it comes down to actually viewing movies. The sound on the Philips audio is poor, not worth listening, so headphones are a must--compared to the decent sound on the Panasonic unit.
The Philips unit is also advertised to pay "anything," which is anything but the truth, as it play only a select number of disks. I backup my DVD disks before going on LONG trips so as not to scratch or loose my expensive DVD disks. This little unit only plays about 1 out of 6 of them, while the Panasonic plays 5 our of 6. The Philips will not play ANY DL disks. I did a search on the web and found a hack or firmware update for the Philips unit which greatly improved its ability to play disks; if you plan to buy this unit, this is a MUST--even though it will never play DL disks.
The one positive attribute that betters the Philips over the Panasonic unit is that it plays DivX encoded disks--again Panasonic showing its age. This is important as if you go on 10-12 hour flights like I do, you can store many movies on one DVD disk. Do note that this unit has six hours advertised battery life, though I have never had the chance to test it. Another of the weakness is that it doesn't have an auto turn on (like the Panasonic unit); instead there is a side switch to power up and off. When putting it in the carry case (you have to buy this separate not included with unit) it is easy to turn the unit on by accident, so when I tried taking the unit on a long flight it only lasted an hour before dying as the switch had been on for several hours in the protective carrying case and drained the battery. Poor design plagues this unit from top to bottom. The Panasonic unit has a basic battery life of a couple of hours but you can buy additional battery packs that give you an additional 5 hours each--I have two, so have 12 hours without recharging.
So if you use Divx movies a lot, then the Philips unit do you best; but if you are looking for quality, reliability, good design, good construction, better sound and picture, and a strong customer service (Philip's POOR customer service is legendary)then going with a Panasonic LX-8, used or new, is a no brainier.
Basically, the rule of thumb is never buy Philips (European) if you can swing an alternative, quality Japanese brand for near the same money or you can afford to spend the extra money to go with true quality. Some might see this as bigotry or Asian prejudice (I am American BTW), but it is just the way the products are made, nothing to do with the actual countries themselves. I use all American and European High End Audio products in my home audio system, but these little gizmos are a different story!
Digital camera Review: A fine choice.
Summary: 4 Stars
I purchased this item 2 weeks ago and am very happy with it. The screen is very sharp and clear, the sound through the speakers is adequate.
I haven't tried it with earphones yet. My only complaint is that it does indeed make some loud noises when you first put in the DVD, but it is quiet once it is playing. There was an incident the first day where I put in a DVD and it didn't seem to want to load, but after opening and closing the cover and it came right up. It has not happened since and I'm using it daily.
I popped in a CD my sister had made containing a bunch of short movies off the internet and the ones correctly formatted in a way the player could read played just fine.
It gets a 4.5 stars.
Digital camera Review: AWESOME PRODUCT!!!!
Summary: 5 Stars
Just got back from Niagara falls, ontario, took the train from NEw york city which was 10 hour ride, me and my 10 yEAR DAUGHTER LOVED HAVING THIS ITEM WITH US..great picture and great battery life, Im pretty sure I got more than 7 hours on this battery..plus you could hook up one of those game joysticks, as well as hook up your digital camera and watch your pics on way home from your vacation.
GREAT PRODUCT and deinitly beats the Sony dvp-fx810(or something like that).
Digital camera Review: AWESOME!! Player
Summary: 5 Stars
Got this for my wife and kid traveling outside the country and we liked watching the DVDs on this rather than our 27 inch tube tv. Colors are great, battery life is unbelievable. Short-listed Panasonic LS91, Sony FX8 and this and spent two days researching and decided on the Philips. GLAD I did that.
Panasonic is great no question about that but is pricey. Sony display is not good enough. Philips surprised me...its like all those great Korean cars that are surprising everyone
Digital camera Review: Bad Player?
Summary: 1 Stars
Wanted a portable DivX and Burned DVD player, with focus on being able to entertain friends.
Frighteningly disappointing. Right out of the box, I put in a burned DVD. Player was having immense trouble playing just the menu! Kept making these horrible noises like scratching and grinding. Then before I even tried playing my movie, the player would spin down! Tried with DVD+ and DVD- same result. The manual is in like 30 languages and opens like a massive map, and when you finally find ENGLISH, you see that there is MINIMAL troubleshooting. Gave up on my Burned DVD's.
Tried the DivX function. Put in a DVD loaded with pictures, avi, mpg, mov, and rm files.
1. It takes an annoyingly long time to scan the disc before showing the contents.
2. It won't list any files it can't play (like QuickTime and Real)
3. If you want to display a picture, it thinks it is a movie and puts it on screen for less than a second! And forget about slideshows!
4. If your TV is NTSC, then you have to Scroll through the Player's menus etc. to change it over to PAL for any PAL movies!
5. It has trouble with large DivX files. Enough to make it unusable. If you need to fast-forward through a large part of the movie, forget it - it totally freezes up!
6. Worst but not least, the whole time, it kept making this insane, high pitch noise that sounded like an army of dog whistles in you ear, only more grating. It kept making the noise, then it would stop and start again after about 10 seconds and go for a long time. I knew this noise would never fly with ANY of my friends. I couldn't take it and I have bad hearing and am a very tolerant person..lol!
This is what I found in about 1 hour of testing, and I wasn't trying to test it at all! I just wanted to watch ANYTHING and it just so happened that the PET wasn't able to make that happen. Imagine what you would find out if you REALLY tested it? I didn't. I sent it back.
I have seen a better DivX player in a modded Xbox EASY! and MUCH cheaper too. All the problems I just discussed are NO PROBLEM on a modded Xbox. And that came out in 2001! The DivX player industry right now is basically non-existent. It is too experimental for real people to actually use it.
Bottom line: The only people who like this unit are rich, yuppie, loaded guys who just want every gadget and don't plan on REALLY using it. ..or, they just got ripped off really bad on a portable DVD player for just playing storebought DVDs.