DVD & HDTV Reviews

Just picked this new Vizio up and love it! I was looking for a new TV for the bedroom and this fits the bill perfectly. The case comes in a new color Java which I was a little worried about initially. After having seen it in person before purchasing it and now having it in the house, I feel its a great color. It matches my dark merlot furniture very well. Setup was a breeze and I was watching TV in just a few minutes after getting it out of the box.

In the busy market of small TV’s the personal reasons I went for the Vizio are:

1. One of the few 26" 1080p TV’s (even though I understand most programming isn’t offered in 1080)

2. Price point. Vizio is the best bargain out there for quality LCD TV’s. I had considered the Samsung 22" that got great reviews, but for only a few dollars more, I got this TV that is 4" larger and is 1080p. Plus I have known folks to have issues with Samsung.

3. Style. I like the way the TV looks. Very sleek looking. Java is a neat color that isn’t offered by anyone else. I’m sure other brands will start offering new colors now.

Overall the picture is amazing. I thought buying a Vizio meant compromising on picture quality to get a better price, but with this TV I didn’t have to. Watching this TV right next to its competitors in the store really showed that Vizio offers a top notch product. Again the price can’t be beat!

I bought the BDVE300 to go with a Sony 52Z5100 HDTV that I also bought from Amazon. I bought it mainly because I wanted to match the two items for both esthetic and practical reasons. The black speakers match the TV perfectly. I can also control both with one controller and easily run the TV sound through the HTS.
I am not an audiophile. So I didn’t try to compare technical specs. This review is strictly subjective (in part to counter the one above) and is based on what I have heard while using the system with the TV.
The room in which the TV is located in is a 20 X 20 den/family room with a connecting dining area and kitchen. The entire area is open. It has wooden floors with a single oval area rug in front of the fireplace and TV.
I found the sound to be exceptionally clear and clean, without distortion or unevenness. I can tell a definite difference between the TV speakers and the BDV300 speakers. The BDV300 sound seems more spacious. It fills the room without blowing you away. The sound has more fullness to it than the TV speakers.
I have not tried it at full volume. I have never felt the need to do so. I have watched two musical DVDs, a Mary Chapin Carpenter concert and the 10th anniversary recording of Les Miserables. In both cases the music sounded beautiful and clear. You could hear all of nuances of the voices and the words of the songs were distinct and clear.
If you want strong bass that shakes the room, I am not sure this is the system for you. The bass is there but it is blended in with the other sounds. I am sure I can adjust it for greater effect. However, I am currently running the system at default values.
As for the lack of an S-air wireless cartridge, as mentioned by the reviewer above. It is true you have to buy it separately. However, everything I read about the system stated this plainly up front. If you need this feature it is available as an option. In researching this system I found this individual posted the same opinion on every web site he could find. I don’t think his opinion was a fair assessment of the system’s capabilities.
I found the set up to be rather easy. The instructions show various options on installing it alone with the TV or with a cable/SAT box or with an external DVD, etc. With the external mic it took about one minute to calibrate and maybe 15 mins. to connect the wires.
Be aware that Sony uses a proprietary plug on the DVD/Radio/Amp end of the system. The speaker end is a simple pinch type terminal. There is a FM & AM receiver as part of the system. I have not tried them yet. The DVD/CD/Blue ray player worked fine.
The bottom line is: The BDVE300 does everything Sony says it does. If you are looking for something to enhance your TV experience and play CDs with good clear sound, this system will do it well. For the price, I think it is an excellent value. I found no "gotchas" or "I can’t believe they did this". So I gave it a rating of 5. I am very pleased with my purchase.

I purchased the DHT-FS3 hoping not so much for a 5.1 sound-alike experience but simply hoping for a good "TV speaker replacement" system. Unfortunately, while the Denon is the best sounding system of its type, it simply wasn’t to be for my application.

First, the size of the unit is a bit larger in some ways that one would expect and smaller than others. Denon obviously designed the unit to fit in front of a flat screen TV, as they thoughtfully provided feet that are widely spaced (about 20") so that the unit can straddle the front of most TV manufacturer’s flat screen pedestals. But it’s also wider than one might expect - it’s wider than a 16:9 32" TV, but a bit narrower than a 37".

The sound is GOOD, but not great. At no time will you think you’re in front of not only a 5.1 surround system but even a decent stereo system using bookshelf loudspeakers; however it does sound better than any built-in TV speakers could, and it outdoes most "mini" systems as well, likely including offerings such as Denon’s own S-101 HTIB system. Like most such systems, the bass is a bit "thumpy" - the sub just doesn’t integrate well with the satellites and crosses over fairly high - around 125-150 Hz - so you never lose sight of the fact that most of your sound is coming from "up there" but the bass notes are coming from "down there."

The unit has multiple inputs - two sets of RCAs for analog, including one set that can be used with one of Denon’s iPod docks, two optical digital and one coaxial digital. The setup has many nice features, including distance to the listener, bass/treble (unlike Bose systems, but here the adjustments are in fairly large 2dB increments) and a nice universal remote to control your TV, DVD player and the speaker unit. It can play in straight stereo, "wide" surround, Dolby Digital or even DTS, and all sound reasonably good for this application.

The design flaw? While not Denon’s fault, most every flat panel TV manufacturer puts the sensor for their remote control along the bottom of the TV, meaning if the Denon’s sitting in front of the TV, I can just about guarantee it will be blocking the TV’s remote sensor unless you’re using it with a larger set (40" or more) and the sensor’s in the corner, or your TV somewhat more intelligently placed the sensor along the TV’s sides or top frame.

I don’t mean to come across as overly harsh, but I really had high hopes for a product like this from Denon, and sound-wise it really didn’t sound as good as I thought it would. That’s not really their fault; you can only do so much with smaller drivers in a rather small enclosure. But on the other hand, it does do a better job of producing a virtual surround effect than any TV’s built-in surround effect (e.g. "SRS") or the similar Yamaha Sound Projectors.

So in short, it’s worth a try if you’re looking for a product like this, but the fact that it would block my TV’s IR sensor immediately made it a non-starter for me as soon as I removed it from its box. Perhaps in a future model Denon can thoughtfully provide an "IR blaster" on the back of the unit to automatically repeat IR signals it sees to any TV sensors that may be located behind it.

It’s truly a beautiful LOOKING unit, the piano black finish blending nicely with the similar finish used on most flat panels that don’t use a silvery frame. It’s certainly a reasonable value for the price, given what it would cost to build a similar quality system for components or find as high quality a HTIB ("Home Theatre in a Box") system.

However, for the sole reason that it blocks my TV’s remote sensor, I’ve no alternate place to place it, and it neither has an IR blaster nor provision to drive one, it’s back in its shipping box just about three hours after first opening it.

There seems to be a lack of reviews online for the new Sony 560 and Panasonic 80 Blu-ray players. So I purchased both of these Blu-ray players from Amazon, mainly becuase I wanted to do a critical, side by side comparison of all features and the audio and video quality. It wasn’t a professional test-based comparison, just flipping back and forth between these players and my Samsung BD-UP5000 Blu-ray/HD DVD player on my Sony 52" Bravia LCD and studying the image with a critical eye. (I got 3 copies of the Braveheart Blu-ray to do this). Here’s what I discovered:

Video Quality: Pretty much a dead tie. Both players had rich, dark blacks. Video noise (smoothness) of the pictures was so close that I couldn’t tell which I was watching most of the time. Sharpness was the same. Both pictures had good "3D pop". I wouldn’t be surprised if both players used the same chipset. (By the way, the Samsung uses the Reon HQV chip, and while it looked a bit "smoother" by comparison, a tiny bit of the sharpness and detail shown on the Sony and Panasonic was missing on the Samsung. Also the Samsung has a very slight cyan cast to the blacks and the overall picture.)

Audio Quality: I think the Panasonic wins here, but only by a slim margin. Panasonic touts this player as a "high clarity audio" Blu-ray player and it does sound sweet through my Onkyo TS-SR805 receiver, on my Paradigm Monitor 11 speakers. Again, this conclusion is based only on the DolbyHD sountrack on the Braveheart Blu-ray. I’m going to do more serious listening, but I think the Panasonic will still prove better, audio-wise, with any source material.

Audio Formats: Both of these players will Bitstream or PCM output the new HD audio formats. This means that if your receiver doesn’t decode them, the player will. Or vice-versa. Some people say pre-amps/receivers do a better job at decoding than BD players do, but I guess that depends on your gear. The Panasonic DMP-BD80 sure sounds good, and I couldn’t hear a decoding difference between it or my receiver. With the Sony, I think the receiver may have sounded a touch better, but that might have been in my head.

Speed and Handling: No question about it, the Sony beats the Panasonic hands down. This new Panasonic is no faster than last year’s model it replaced, the 55. Everything about the Panasonic is slow…load times, react times when buttons are pressed, or when skipping chapters. The Sony 560 is about the same as the PS3. Every cloud has a silver lining, and the Panasonic DOES give you time to make a cup of tea while your disc is loading! Another little thing about the Panasonic that I don’t like is the size (width) of the disc tray…it’s the same size or a hair bigger than the disc itself (instead of being smaller like most players) so it’s very hard to grab the disc. This sounds like a little niggle, but try it and see. It will drive you nuts every time you try to remove a disc…you’ll end up dropping them back onto the tray if you’re not extremely careful.

Remote Controls: They’re about the same…both very flimsy and cheaply made. Put a gun to my head and I’ll say the Panasonic’s remote is a little heavier and has larger buttons that are a little better laid out. The Sony 560 is drawing fire for this because it doesn’t have an eject/drawer open button on the remote. This is a silly complaint…correct me if I’m wrong, but you almost have to be standing in front of the player to put a disc in or take a disc out anyway, right?!?!?! So what’s the big deal about having to press the "open" button on the player? Serious remote-picky people have a Harmony remote anyway.

Other Convenience Features: Neither of these players has Netflix built in, I guess that’s a big deal now. Unless they can steam full-quality 1080P (without pauses, subject to my ISP speed) I could care less about that. The reason I have 3 Blu-ray players is because I care about quality and I’m not too cheap to buy Blu-ray movies! The Panasonic has the Amazon/VieraCast and YouTube feature though. Again, I have no desire to see a rough, low-quality mpeg video shot by an idiot on a cell phone on my high def TV! Both of these players are BD 2.0 (BD Live) capable, but only the Sony has Wi-Fi built in. That’s a nice feature because you don’t have to run a CAT-5 cable from your router to your Blu-ray player. I think the 560 is the first stand alone BD player to have this (the PS3 had it all along). The Panasonic has 7.1 channel analog (RCA) audio outputs, important to people that have older receivers without HDMI. The Sony 560 dropped this feature that used to be on last year’s 550 model. Most people have newer, HDMI capable receivers, so I see why they did it. (Sony also did it to make their step-up model, the BDPS1000ES seem more attractive. (That player is $699 and is basically a 560 with a handful of extra features added, like a headphone jack). The Panasonic has an SD card slot on the front, good if you want to view your pictures on your TV, and a USB jack. The Sony features two USB jacks, one on the front and one on the back.

Build Quality: About the same, maybe the Sony wins here by a hair. Both are smallish players, not very deep. The Sony is about 8/10’s of an inch taller.

Conclusion: Overall I like the Sony better. It’s wireless connectivity is a great feature, and Sony has a great history (with the PS3) of keeping the firmware updated, and this makes it easier. The Panasonic is a nice player, and has slightly better sound, but I’m sticking with the Sony. Anyone wanna buy a slightly used Panasonic DMP-BD80?

(By the way…I had no audio problems whatsoever with the Sony, like some other reviewers had. The Sony has a lot of audio output settings, and I still think some of them had them set wrong. That, or their other gear couldn’t handle the output from the 560. I’m seeing a bunch of posts online recently about different TV’s and receivers not being compatible or being able to handle certain audio signals, especially bitstream…if your gear doing the decoding doesn’t have the "oomph" or processing power to decode it, it will choke and puke!)

I bought one of these, and it’s AWESOME! For the price, the versatility is unreal. You can burn a CD, DVD or put your files on a flash drive or even an external hard drive, and it plays them all! Not advertised is that it plays .mp4 [iPod / iTunes music]. It does not play m4p songs purchased of of iTunes, but it will if you burn a regular CD, then rip the songs back in.

The delay to play any file is short. It recognizes discs in about 5-8 seconds, and flash drives even less. A video file with a large bitrate does take longer to load, but it’s well worth it.

Everything listed here was tested with 2GB and 4GB flash drives…

Will not play a .mov file, but it will play the file if it is renamed with a .avi or a .mp4 extension and both audio and video streams are supported.

Apparently it will not play an AAC audio file or audio stream within a video file if bitrate info is missing, or if it uses an ADTS muxing mode. One or both of these are true, could not isolate which.

Does not play MJPEG video [like from a Kodak digital camera], but it does play the 88.2 Kbps 11.025 KHz LPCM audio stream within a MJPEG .avi file.

Did not play the H.264 stream within an .avi or mp4 container, but it did play the AAC stream.

Played several AAC files created by iTunes, all encoded at various bitrates and sample rates [41 & 48 KHz, 96-192 KHz]
Does play WMV 9 with WMA 9.2 audio
Does play .MPG MPEG 1 video with MPEG audio
Does not play .MKV file with x264 codec
Plays WMA and MP3.
Plays files off an external hard drive as well, but it must be formatted as FAT16 or FAT32.

I was tasked with getting a small TV to put in my parents’ kitchen. After reading lots of online reviews and looking at some sets in local stores, I finally decided to take the leap with this unit even though there were complaints of sound quality and small viewing angles. I have several friends with larger Samsung LCDs and they all have been very satisfied, so I trusted the brand.

I’m rather glad I did. This TV now sits on a counter between the main kitchen and the dining area, and while it’s obviously not as clear from every angle as it is straight on, its horizontal viewing angle is at least as good as other LCDs I’ve seen and better than many. We don’t really test the vertical viewing angle much since it’s waist to chest height, but it seemed acceptable to me when I sat on the ground in front of it.

I was only marginally concerned about the sound since they have the option of passing the audio through to the kitchen zone of their distributed audio system, but the speakers hold up well for what they are. Don’t expect the same sound that comes out of the sound bar of a 42-62" TV since these speakers are appreciably smaller, but they fill the fairly large kitchen/dining area just fine. Don’t know if I got a great unit or it’s just quieter in our place than other reviewers’, but I don’t see us having to turn it up much higher than 60 out of 100.

Can’t really comment on the overall picture quality as they’re just running standard definition to it at this point, but the colors are great.
Very much recommend this model to anyone looking for a small basic set.

Pros
- Good colors
- Easy to set up
- Price: got it for $221 shipped during a special

Cons
- Muting the sound on the unit doesn’t mute the pass-through sound signal

Neutral
- Sound isn’t as good as larger TVs, but this is to be expected with smaller speakers.

This TV has a great picture from the front easily the best in the 26" market. I searched for a long time and compared it to Sony and LG. I was considering Sony’s new KDL-26L5000 but this Samsung has double the contrast ratio.

Unfortunately the only negative is also the deal killer for me and that is the side viewing angle. I think the Sony did better in this area but not enough to warrant it over this samsung. Ultimately I decided to go with the Samsung LN32B650 for the bedroom over this 26" Samsung as it has a better vewing angle, info link, 1080P, LAN port, and you can use the USB to actually view things and not just for service/firmware upgrades. Granted the LN32B650 is double the price

If you are looking for a LCD for the bedroom or kitchen where you plan to watch it head on and not the side then this is it. If you are insistent on a 26" TV again, this is the best one out there right now. The fact is, if you want a TV with all the current bells and whistles, 32 inches is the smallest size you can find it in

There are several to choose from. The main three are LCD, plasma, and DLP. LCD and plasma offer "true" flat panel displays–thin enough to hang on your wall. DLP refers to the "digital light processing" technology that’s inside rear-projection TVs. Unlike the rear projection TVs of a few years ago, the new DLP TVs are thinner as well, but not yet to the point where you can hang them on your wall. But DLP has a price advantage, which means you can get a bigger screen for less money. Plasma and LCDs are rapidly coming down in price, though, especially LCDs, putting more pressure on DLP manufacturers. With DLP, you can also get a front-projection system, which requires a dedicated screen. This is the preferred method of many home-theater buffs, since it allows for a flawless picture and a much larger screen, but it’s not the optimal set-up for most living rooms.

The traditional CRT television also comes in high definition, although many find the large picture tubes required for a bigger screen to be too heavy and unwieldy for many living rooms, especially as the industry is moving toward flat-panel displays.

In terms of quality, LCD, plasma, and DLP all come in a variety of high-def resolutions, and each side will argue that they offer the best experience. That’s a much longer discussion, but we’ll just say that each one has their strengths and a few weaknesses depending on the type of environment and content you like to watch.

This system is awesome. I’ve had it for about a month now and watched a few movies with it. I’m not an audiophile and this is my first surround sound system for my primary living room theater.
I picked this system mainly because of the tower speakers and the S-AIR module. It’s a all in one system with a blue ray disk player that supports about 5 different digital audio codecs. It’s a clean minimalist design. I was surprised by the depth of the receiver. It’s bigger than I expected and fills the majority of shelf space in my entertainment stand.
One thing that bugged me are the the buttons on the top front edge of the receiver. They are small, the same shape and color which force you to read the label to tell what they are. This makes it even more irritating because the remote doesn’t have an eject button and I had to learn which of those tiny buttons would eject my disk. I guess I’m really lazy.
Assembly took all but 15 minutes. It took more time to arrange the pieces around the room. There’s a quick setup guide that will calibrate your system with an included microphone.
One thing to be aware of, as with most HTIB, there are no video inputs. What this means, is that you’ll need to connect all your video sources directly to the TV or a HDMI switch. However, there are mutliple audio inputs. So for example, if you wanted to connect your XBOX 360 to this unit, you’ll have to connect your HDMI to your tv and then use an optical cable to route the audio to the receiver. Or you could use the optical out from your TV. This is not ideal, in my opinion, but then again that was not a goal for me.
The sound is crisp, and clean. The sub-woofer gives strong enough punch that you can feel in your chest.
Blue ray disks load quicker than my LG blue ray player.

My less-than-enthusiastic review is based on what my expectations for the player were, not on its actual performance.

I needed a cheap DVD player to go with a cheap TV I have that only takes S-Video input. So I bought this Toshiba SD4200 DVD player specifically because, at least at the time of purchase, both Amazon and the Toshiba website indicated that it had S-Video output. When it arrived, however, I discovered it did not (only component and RCA). A Toshiba rep confirmed the website error and apologized. To compensate, I had to buy an RCA to S-Video adapter, which luckily only cost about $10.

Unfortunately, this was not my only disappointment. The image of the player on both Amazon and Toshiba would lead you to believe that the display includes track timing, when really the only thing that shows is the track number. Given that track timing and S-Video were the ONLY requirements I had in mind before buying a DVD player, I was rather irked to discover this. Another strange feature I’ve never seen before is the lack of track buttons on the player itself; you can only skip between tracks using the remote control. I should have noticed this before buying, since it’s right there in the pictures, but it just didn’t occur to me. This is only a minor annoyance, but it’s still something that probably would have led me to purchase a different player, especially given the large number of available options.

These problems could all have been avoided had I looked at the actual user manual from Toshiba online, which gave proper information and images. So I’ve learned to check the manual before buying electronics online, rather than just rely on basic information from the vendor and/or the manufacturer.

As for the performance of the player, thus far I’ve not had any trouble with either CDs or DVDs (about two months of use). Overall, with the RCA/S-Video adapter in place I’ve grown content with the unit. I’ve had good experience with two other Toshiba products (portable hard drive, portable DVD player) and therefore anticipate this one will also wear well.