Is the Schneider DVD-857 as good as it looks? (Schneider DVD 810)

Member Name: hsiboy

Product:	Schneider DVD 810
Date:	22/07/03 (713 review reads)
Rating:

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I'm not sure why this has turned up in the 810 category. This review *is* for the 857.

The time had come to get a DVD player.

For a long time i had been looking for a dvd player, that supported mp3 music, CD-r & CD-rw as well as VCD and was region free. All of this for under £100, that was my quest for the holly grail.
I thought it might just be possible, when last year i saw the Schneider dvd-587 player on sale in ASDA for just £99. They sold out quickly and i lost my chance.

That is until the returned last moth for the low low Wal-Mart price of £59 (which is about the average price of a DVD player in the USA).

Call it impulse, but i snatched it off the shelf and returned home, without having a proper look at it.

** Open The Box **

Inside the box you will find a straight audio lead (2 channel left + right), a scart lead, a composite video lead, the player, the remote control, two batteries and the instructions.

The player is silver (as all AV equipment seems to be at the moment), and the front panel is sleek and mirrored. The DVD drawer is in the centre of the machine, and when its not in standby (e.g. switched on and playing) two blue LEDs illuminate either side of it (thats one thing I don?t like). The front panel display (dot matrix VFD) remains invisible behind the mirrored fascia, when its not switched on, I do like that, very stylish.

** Techno Bable **

It can play,

DVD, VCD, MP3 and Photo-CD (JPEG)

Round the back there is more connections than you would expect.
For those of you with a nice TV, it can supply it with composite video, RGB (via scart) and S-Video.

Audio can be supplied via coaxial and optical digital sockets, or plain old rca sockets (or via the scart lead of course) with Dolby Digital and DTS decoding on-board, you don?t need an expensive Dolby cinema surround sound amplifier (just 5.1).

I should point out here, that
it only has one scart socket (no loop through).

** Action **

DVD playback is quit
e quick, it doesn?t take a long time to skip chapters, but it can be slow to get to the root menu after putting the disc in.
Playback performance is impressive with fine detail and colour rendered cleanly without some of the blocking found on cheap players. The player has little difficulty rendering darker scenes, smooth graduation around a candle flame in a dimly lit room for example. However when there's a lot of movement in a scene (battle sequence in gladiator) the player's reproduction is excellent, it has no problems capturing action, impressing she who must be obeyed!

The sound quality is much better than I expected. Now I haven?t got an optical input on my amp (Cambridge) but I can tell you that the amount of background hiss is no more than that of my dennon cd player, and I only really notice when I?m wearing headphones. The player has a menu to adjust the speaker output but you can only choose between small, medium and large speakers, and that doesnt make a great deal of difference. The subwoofer channel is fairly dynamic with a low background rumble really getting behind the big explosions in pearl harbour.

** Grumbles **

The remote control is not great, too many very small buttons.

The buttons on the front of the player, are all tiny, and identical, making you get down on your hands and knees to see what it what.

The player wasnt able to play discs from R1 out of the box (it is advertised as R? only), but following the following instructions enabled this:

1) Press Open/Close on remote
2) Press Clear on remote
3) Press 1, 3, 6 and 9 on the remote
4) Press 1 on remote, for region 1, 2, for region 2, and so on, or 0 for multi-region playback
5) Press Open/Close on your remote

I should point out here, that my purchase was not without problem. In fact I had to
return four players before I got one that worked fully (i even got one that i had previously returned!!).
That doesn?t instil me with a great amount of confidence in ASDA or the player (and ASDA customer service leaves a lot to be desired), but so far so good.

And for £59 it does represent real value for money.

HSIBOY

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