Tesco Value is not always best. (Tesco DVD 1030 Player)

Member Name: danball

Product:	Tesco DVD 1030 Player
Date:	05/03/09 (233 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Plays alot of different formats.

Disadvantages: Noisy. Feels cheap.

I know what you're going to say, why buy a DVD player for peanuts and then omplain about it? Well, if you buy something, no matter what price it is, yo would expect it to work!

I bought this DVD player from my local Tesco about two years because the one I had been using in my bedroom previously had broken and I knew I only needed a DVD player in my bedroom for a few months as I was going to move. It cost under twenty quid (around £18 if memory serves me correctly) and came in a white and blue box (Tesco's signature 'Value' branding at work here). Once unboxed, you just plug in and play. The power lead goes into wall and the scart lead goes into the tv (hardly rocket science).

The DVD player itself feels cheap and quite fragile but it is what you expect for that price. You get what you pay for. The disc tray feels as if it will fall off at any moment so extreme care should be used when taking out or putting in your treasured DVDs. The sound of the disc spinning inside the player is unbearably loud. So much so infact that the actual audio of the DVD I was trying to watch was not audible over the sound of the DVD player working. This alone renders this DVD useless but the DVD player does not give you a great audio quality either. I'm aware that different inputs give different levels of volume but when I turned off the DVD player (which was playing at a suitable level) my freeview box takes over and the level of the audio was scarily loud. This shows how quiet the sound was coming from the DVD player.

There was also some ocassions where this DVD player refused to play any DVDs at all. It simply failed to acknowledge that a disc had been inserted. It wasn't as if I was asking it to play copied DVDs, these were all original and official purchased copies. This seemed to occur randomly which was quite frustrating.

There are some good aspects of this DVD player though. For example, this plays a wide range of formats (DVD, DVDR, DVDRW, CD, CDR, CDRW and more). It is also very easy to convert this to a multi-region DVD if you need to play DVDs from around the world. A useful feature as DVDs can often be bought much cheaper online if they are from a different 'DVD region'.

The remote control feels far from solid and each time I dropped it (I'm a clumsy git) I really had the feeling that it would shatter into tiny pieces and my DVD player would become useless. Apart from a few dents and one very small crack, it still worked ok when I retired it.

Although only a small annoyance, the screensaver that comes up if you pause your DVD for too long is a hideous Tesco logo. Something that I would love to remove.

Overall, I would say it's worth investing a few more quid and getting something much much better.

Summary: Stay away unless you really have to!

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