Coby TFDVD7008 7-Inch Portable DVD/CD/MP3 Player
The price is right on this little unit. The picture is a little better than my previous two portable units. The sound is a little worse (if I could increase the volume just a little bit more it would be perfect). It’s very lightweight. Like most cheap units, I expect to get 1-2 years of play out of this unit before I’ll need to look for another.
Unusually, this unit comes with a little remote control. This remote gives you a lot more control over functions than most portable DVD players; you can for example skip directly to a specified point on the disk. And you can do things like set a chapter to endlessly looped play, or pick two points on the disk and have it endlessly loop between those two points. The "zoom" feature the remote gives you is great and is the reason why I gave this unit a fourth star rather than the three stars a cheap unit normally deserves.
Now the bad thing about that remote is that (1) it’s small, and (2) there is no way of attaching the remote to or within the player so that I can already see that it is easy to misplace the remote. (I’m already considering using velcro to solve this problem).
The manual is not so great. It gets points for actually using the English language well, but loses lots of points on what it doesn’t bother to tell you. You have to experiment a bit to discover undocumented features and functions. For example, the forward and reverse buttons work differently when you are currently zoomed in; they become instead pan right and pan left buttons.
And the manual won’t tell you what you have to do to shut the unit down so that so that it restarts at the point on the disk where you left off. (If you just try stopping or pausing it reloads the disk and starts from the beginning). I’ve had success two ways: (1) pausing the picture and letting the unit go into (the undocumented) power saver mode. If you then turned the unit off and immediately back on, it seemed to remember where it left off. An even easier way: (2) use the remote to turn the unit off. If you then use the remote to turn it back on, it picks back up where it left off.
Here’s another little undocumented feature. Like most units manufactured for multiple markets, there is a programming sequence you can use to change what region this player can play. Here’s how to set up this player to play other region-codes using the remote:
1. Open DVD tray
2. Press the "Menu" button (ignore message "Not allowed at this moment")
3. Press 8888
4. Press the "Display" button
5. Region Code Number shows up. Use the numeric keypad to select your
region code number (0 - 6).
6. Press the Enter button.
I’ve verified my unit plays both region 1 and region 2 disks.