Performance
The first annoyance with this player appeared at first power up, its almost like it’s a pc with the switch on time taking up to 10 seconds before you can do anything with it, including ejecting a disc!
I normally use a Panasonic SCHT520 DVD player for all my movies, which costs more than the £70 RRP of the DV-100B, so it was expected that the picture quality would be poorer. This was far from the case. The image was crisp and vibrant, the sound quality was not as good, comparatively speaking, but all the same, given the price bracket the DV-100B does perform well.
Seemingly, the big selling point that the DV-100B has is the 5-in-1 card reader mounted on the front of the device, although, in practise, it’s more of a gimmick than a truly usable device.
Efforts were made to get the DV-100B to display static images from both Memory Stick and SD media... no luck. Likewise with the movie I had recorded off my Canon IXUS digital camera. It seems the non-upgradable codec was not compatible.
Of course, MPEG-4 support meant it’s capable of DiVX playback as well. Searching through my old CDs I found a disc with a DiVX 3.11 encoded file on it. Loading it up in the player, I was presented with a simple file menu system not too dissimilar to Windows Explorer, one click press on the remote and playback began.
The playback, though a little blocky in places, was perfectly acceptable given the age of the file. Upon testing a more recent .avi the quality was much better, yet still, definitely not DVD quality.
