Philips DVP5960 DVD Player with HDMI, 1080i Upscaling, DivX Ultra, USB direct

5 comments

1. 

   P. Le on November 13, 2009 at 6:18 am

   It’s really pretty but it’s not region free. It plays only region 1. At first I was confused so I called the manufacturing company and asked them, and they said that this DVD player is only capable for playing region 1 DVDs.

2. 

   PWA on November 13, 2009 at 7:18 am

   The DVD Player was ok. But my address was not correctly an the lable written.

3. 

   W. Turner on November 13, 2009 at 8:33 am

   Bought this from the Philips on-line store a couple of weeks ago, and have discovered that burned media (like the DivX files it claims to be so great at playing) cause the entire unit–that is, the movie itself, the menu screens, everything–to go to black & white. The customer service people claimed that since it will play commercial DVDs in color, the unit is functioning fine, and had no suggestions. I’m returning mine for a refund, but if you’re looking for a DVD player with b&w video output to complement your old-timey gramophone audio, this might be one to consider.

4. 

   W. Saumweber on November 13, 2009 at 9:36 am

   Despite the description given here the thing takes only Region Code 1 (USA & Canada) DVDs. Forget it.

5. 

   R. A. Edington on November 13, 2009 at 11:26 am

   I was primarily and desperately searching for an HD JPEG viewer, and so the following review was written based soley on that alleged feature of this player:

   PROBLEMS:

   Paging down (or up) through the list of JPEG files doesn’t support holding down the key for a repeated page-down. You have to hit the button once for each page-down.

   Sometimes paging up and down through the list of files just hangs the system, necessitating an eject-disk to solve the problem.

   Painting JPEGs on the screen is really slow — like 4 to 8 seconds (or more!) for my “average” size jpegs (like 1280×1024), painting from top to bottom in slow motion. To make matters worse, there’s no way to control for how long each picture is displayed. Default picture display before moving onto next picture is apparently hardcoded at 4 seconds (after picture is finally finished painting). What this means, for all practical purposes, is that you’re sitting around watching the PAINTING more than the VIEWING of the whole picture!!!! This is pretty much the deal-killer for me. Why they can’t paint each JPEG into a buffer in the background, and then just whip it up onto the screen, is beyond me. Lame lame lame lame lame! If it’s going to do HD JPEG, it MUST do it faster than this!!!!

   Only 648 pictures per folder supported, ignores everything after that. This limitation is not listed in the manual.

   Apparently, non-JPEG files in the folder result in a four-second blanking out of the screen when they come up for playback. I’m talking files that don’t even have a JPG extension.

   Long filenames are not handled gracefully. On a burnt CD, the long filenames are cut off after 14 characters or so. From a USB device thumb drive, the long filenames are mangled back to 8.3-with-a-tilde hell. Again, these limitations are not listed in the manual, in fact the manual clearly states that 30 character filenames are supported.

   When in shuffle mode, cannot backtrack to the previous picture or pictures once you’ve gone beyond it.

   Pressing prev/next in JPEG Preview mode works only sometimes. According to the manual, it should page through thumbnail images, 12 at a time. I only got this to work about half the time. Can you say, “buggy firmware”?

   No way to get any picture info in the middle of the slideshow, you have to stop the slideshow!

   Shuffle mode works, but apparently no way to select “shuffle” and “repeat folder” at the same time. When in shuffle mode, slideshow stops when all files have been displayed.

   There doesn’t seem to be any way to manually flip from picture to picture. The slideshow starts automatically. You can press Pause, then Next Picture, but at that point Pause is undone, and automatic playback resumes.

   The included remote control was lame. For instance, the button marked “Display” did two distinctly different functions, depending on where I was at the time, and neither function was what I was intuitively expecting (like maybe “display” some info about the JPEG file while in a slideshow? Nah, forget it! That feature’s not available at all, much less assigned to the “Display” button!) Also, at a normal distance and angle from the DVD player, the remote seemed to frequently not function, and I had to repeated press keys to get them to work. Maybe it shipped with weak batteries, I neither know nor care at this point. And, of course there is no indicator light on the remote to let you know whether a signal is being sent or not.

   The manual is truly godawful. Not the least of its problems is that it was neither written nor proofread by an English-language speaker.

   When pausing a picture, the “pause” symbol hangs in the upper-right of the screen forever. So if you thought you could bypass all the limitations mentioned above, and just pause on a single picture and show it for a while, like a work of art, too bad — you have to deal with lameness here too. No nice clean still pictures for YOU! Oh, and to add insult to injury, if you pause a picture too long, the “screen saver” comes on, and disrupts your entire slideshow.

   And now for the good news:

   The picture browser does show “x of y” information when browsing the file list. Whoopee.

   An 800 pixel-tall image showed up full height on a 720p display (unlike on the Samsung HD860). Interestingly, an image that is only 480p tall, also displayed full-height on my 720p set! This “upscaling” actually looks pretty good and is not too pixelated at all. At least they did one thing right.

   Dang, but the JPEGs look great! Truly stunning — Picture quality is excellent. If you’re trying to display a limited number of pictures, and don’t want/expect/need any additional features at all, this would be a nice JPEG viewer. OK, two things right.

   No need to manually switch from SD to HD, like with the Samsung HD860.