LEAN, MEAN, PLAYING MACHINE..... (Matsui DVD 120)

Member Name: cortex101

Product:	Matsui DVD 120
Date:	03/12/02 (444 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: cheap, reliable

Disadvantages: limited functions, better ones now for cheaper

Hello again,

It has been a few days since my last opinion so I thought I would have another go. Well by now you may have realised that I have a bit of a love for films and dvds in particular, hopefully shown by my opinions on some of them. If you haven’t well I do, I love them and I think they are a great way to relax and so forth.

I thought I have done enough ops on dvds so I thought it was about time I wrote one on my player: The Matsui 120. I know its not one of the best players on the market but it does its job for me. So without further ado here we go.

Looks:
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I think one of the most important buying points of anything is its looks, you may not agree with me but I want something to look good in my room and this is just the ticket. Usually I go for the conventional black colour for these sorts of things but I thought hey I’m going to go crazy, silver it is. Well that’s crazy in my books anyway, pink did come to mind but there doesn’t seem to be many of them on the market. I first thought that silver would look quite tacky and cheap but it is far from it, it actually looks like an expensive piece of kit and is extremely pleasing to the eye.

I don’t think anything spoils the looks of this player, its buttons are nicely spaced so if you’ve had too many or anything like that, its very easy to navigate. The buttons don’t stick out at all and are reasonably large about 2cm wide and 0.5 high and are colour coded with the machine. It has pretty standard buttons comprising of, an on/off switch, play, stop and skip backwards and forwards. As you can see the player is not overloaded with complicated buttons of all shapes and sizes.

One of my favouite features of this nifty little player is the size of the display screen. It sits nicely under the bit where you put the dvd (I’ve forgotten the word for this thing where you put the dvds, so please tell me othe
rwise its going to drive me mad). The panel is 170mm wide and 30mm wide so as you can see there is plenty of room to display everything you need and more importantly it does it clearly and concisely. On the display screen you are told what chapter it is, how many chapters there are, how long has elapsed and also what sort of disc you have in there. There isn’t a clock on here however, which I was reasonably surprised at because it seems as if everything like this has a clock on it. Oh well its not a huge technical flaw it just would have been nice.

Imprinted on the dvd player is what it actually plays and what it does, when I bought this machine I was quite naïve and didn’t know much about players. I just wanted something that played the discs instead of having to sit in front of my computer to watch a film. So all the Matsui 120 plays is dvds (no way I hear you say) and audio CDs. We are also told that the player is DTS, which basically means the sound quality is improved. DTS Digital Surround is the only 5.1 surround sound format that can deliver a revolutionary 3-dimensional experience according to dtstech.com. DTS was however one of the things I was looking for and is definitely worth getting.

Dimensions:
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Length: 260mm
Width: 430mm
Height: 90mm

What Can This Player Do:
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Enough about the looks I hear you say, just tell us some more about what this can do. Well I shall. As I mentioned before I didn’t really know what I was looking for when I bought a player and I think this was my first big problem and I think I would have made a different choice if I really had a clue as to what I was doing. First of all the player is only region 2 which although doesn’t sound like a problem, I have come to realise is. Region 2 means that the player can only play discs bought in Europe and a few other places. This means that the Matsui
120 cannot play discs bought from America and Asia and so on. This is a problem because discs are a lot cheaper elsewhere in the world and there is a far larger range in other countries. I will let you in on a little secret here, there are hacks all over the internet for this player which unlock it and you are able to make it region free which means that it can play any dvd from all over the world. This enables you to make great savings and get discs much earlier than you would be able to in England.

The sound this thing can produce is superb and this is enabled by the DTS and Dolby Digital Surround sound. This was quite surprising considering how much this cost and I think is one of the major strengths of the product. If you want to make any improvements and hook this up to a surround sound system, it is incredibly easy to do and comes with all the right holes in all the right places, which is reassuring to know.

Using the remote one can zoom in on the picture, fast forward either quickly or slowly (when I say slowly I mean at about 1 frame a second so unless you are trying to pick something out then I definitely would not recommend this). One can repeat certain areas of the dvd, if you like a particular part or maybe you are trying to learn words for a play or something like that you can mark a certain area using the A-B button and it will keep replaying it until you make it stop. Another feature is that you can zoom in by pressing the zoom button (surprise, surprise), this makes the picture full screen so if you don’t have a widescreen tele and you want a bigger picture then this does the job. Beware, however, as one would expect this does distort the picture to a certain extent. Furthermore if you press the display button on the remote then an on screen display comes up to tell you what chapter you are on and how much time has elapsed.

On some dvds you are able to change the angle using the remote, this is on very few discs and
is usually on music ones if at all. Obviously one can skip through from one chapter to another so you don’t have to wait ages for it to fast forward (very handy indeed). You can also display subtitles if you are hard of hearing and if you have a dvd with subtitles for any reason you can take them off if you so wish.


Cost:
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I bought this product a year or so back and after amassing quite a few Dixons vouchers from Ipoints I thought I would use them and so I did. Back then this pretty piece of kit cost me £129.99 (that was the price without the vouchers). So it was relatively cheap at that time. I would be extremely surprised if it was the same price now with the advent of multi-region players, which have all the extras pushing the price of the lower order down quite considerably.

Matsui is Dixon’s own brand so was the cheapest there but remember other places have deals on all the time so have a good look around first. Players around this sort of standard generally go for about £70 nowadays so don’t buy it for over £100.

You do get what you pay for, if you want a player which really only plays DVDs then this is something you should definitely consider. However if you want a player with all the extras including multi-region and so on then this is probably not the right choice and nowadays it is easy to pick up a player which does almost everything for a slightly higher cost.

Where Can I Buy It:
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As you probably know buy now you can buy DVD players from every electrical shop under the sun. The cheapest place you are going to find it is either Dixons or one of the big stores like Currys or Comet or even Argos. Always have a good look round, if you think that it is overpriced in the shops then have a look around on the Internet which I am sure you are acquainted to. On the Internet it is sometimes the smallest places that have the cheapest prices
so have a really good look and not just search through Amazon. One thing I will say is that if you are buying off the Internet always remember VAT and postage and packaging.

How To Use:
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The Matsui 120 could not be easier to use, unlike a VCR when one has to set the clock and all the other settings associated with recording it is not necessary. To set it up all you have to do is plug it in and attach the scart plug to your TV, trust me this is not hard. However, all new TVs have scart sockets but some of the older ones do not have a scart socket so you will have to buy a phono lead with acts basically as an adapter. This will cost about a tenner so if you have an old TV bear this is mind.

As soon as you use a scart lead the channel you use for the player immediately becomes the AV channel on your TV so there is no worry about tuning the player to your TV. One of the best things about it is the fact that there is no tuning involved. You can just sit back and watch almost straight away. As already mentioned the buttons on the player and the remote are simple to use and moreover looking at it in a shop one would see how easy to use it would be.

There are no complicated areas to this player, everything is made to be extremely simple.


Picture Quality:
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The picture quality is amazing, especially in comparison the video cassettes. It is true to a certain extent that the more you pay the better the picture quality is but having had a watch of some of my mates players there seems to be little or even no difference. The picture is in standard format for DVDs, which is widescreen but it does vary from one disc to another. TV shows such as Friends and Men Behaving Badly are all in full screen because that’s how they were made but nearly all films are in widescreen. I do not have a massive TV so I don’t know what the picture would be like for them but I
can imagine it to be outstanding.

Again it really does come down to the fact that you get what you pay for, and this being one of the cheapest players on the market will not have the best picture quality. The picture can be improved by buying a gold scart lead, which can cost up to about £20. This won’t make the biggest of differences but you will be able to notice an improvement in the sound and picture of the machine.

It is possible to notice the compression on the disc with this player but there again if you look carefully enough, one can spot it on most players even the more expensive one. Any DVD player you do buy is such a dramatic improvement on VHS that they are well worth going and with the price of DVDs going down more and more you will be silly not having a look at the players on the market.

What Comes Included:
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I don’t know if this deal is still running at Dixons, but it might be because I see it on all the time but with my player I got 5 DVDs thrown in for an extra £17. The deal was that you had to buy one disc for full price and you would get four chucked in for free. Again these deals are going on all the time everywhere, you see adverts on TV all the time so do keep an eye out.

Also included is a remote control which has to be the most useful thing that could of come with this player. Usually people assume that because you are spending money on the player the remote comes free and this is not always the case, and most of the time the remote is extremely basic. Not this one, it is full of features, which I have already mentioned and I would be completed lost without it. Speaking of lost if you are anything like me you will lose this thing in the first ten minutes of buying it, so be cautious.

The scart cable also comes included with the player, which cannot be used without it. This saves you around £10 so is definitely a nice extra. It is als
o reasonably cheap to upgrade your scart lead to a better version, if you have a Richer Sounds near you I recommend you use it. There is also an optical output so you will be able to connect the player to an amp and increase the sound quality. Optical cables again cost around £20.

Compared To Other Players:
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Technology constantly gets better so if you buy a player like this you have to expect better ones to come out all the time and they always seem to get cheaper. There are several players on the market at the moment which have a huge range of features, which you can get for under £100. This is where this player comes undone. Maybe a year or two ago this player was a good by buy now it finds it very hard to compete.

For under £90 you can pick up the Kiiro X8 which features include:
Multi-region DVD player
RGB Scart Output
Ultra-Slim design
PAL/NTSC Decoder
DVD, CD, CD-R, CD-RW, MP3
Dolby Digital and DTS Output Compatible
Digital Co-axial Output
Supplied with Free SCART Cable

So clearly you can get far superior DVD players for a price similar to that of the Matsui 120.

Problems:
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There are quite a few problems associated with this player:

1. For some reason if I left my player on standby it would turn itself on from time to time, which could be extremely annoying if I was in bed a the time. I don’t know if this is a general problem with this player or if it was specific to mine. If anyone else has experienced this please could you let me know. Otherwise paranoia will set in over whether my house is haunted or not.
2. Another problem is that this player does not play VCDs or SVCDs which are video CDs. Most of the time these are sold in places like Asia and more and more people have them. I am in no way encouraging you to purchase these illegal CDs but they are realised for promotional reasons som
etimes. If like me you would like to make copies of your DVDs to back up you originals as SVCDs which are super VCDs and of a much better quality than the normal VCD this player will not play them. It is becoming more of a normal thing that these options are included on DVD players
3. The Matsui 120 cannot play mp3 CDs either and with the growth in music sharing over the internet this is a great problem. Furthermore if people backup their mp3s on CD they cannot play them on this. It is possible to store over 200 songs on a CD in mp3 format.
4. Moreover this player is very temperamental over playing CD-Rs and CD-RWs. Some brands I am told will work but most will not. Again this can be extremely annoying if you bought this player safe in the knowledge that it would play music.


To Sum Up:
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Having this machine for over a year now I have to say that I have no major quibbles with it. It serves the purpose that I had in mind for it and that was to play any old DVD. As with all things, however, technology keeps advancing and there are always more powerful machines advancing onto the market all the time. If like me you have this player you will constantly be thinking I wish I had waited a little bit longer.

If simplicity is not what you are looking for and you want something with all the extras then this is not for you and I would definitely not recommend it. However if you do want a simple machine and all you want it for is playing DVDs to a decent quality then this is definitely worth a think about. Personally I think its time for an upgrade as good as my time with this player has been I want a new one. Usually I go for technology with all the fancy gizmos and gadgets and I think I regret not spending a little more money in the first place and having a player that would last me longer.

Recommended Sites:
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www.play.com – really cheap DVDs, m
uch cheaper than most places.
www.amazon.com.uk – cheap again but beware of p&p and VAT.
www.vcdhelp.com – some hacks for your DVD player.
www.richersounds.com – lots of amazing cheap equipment, definitely worth a look.

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Thanks so much for reading my op, it has been a pleasure writing and I hope it has been a pleasure to read.
As always I love the feedback so if you have any comments please do.
Thanks again,
Cortex101

Summary: