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Philips DVD Player (Model#: DVP320F)

Posted by Mark | Filed under Reviews

I recently found out from some friends of mine that our local Tar­get was sell­ing a $50 Philips DVD player that has an extremely sim­ple hack you can use to change the region of the player (more on that later). As an added bonus, this player has com­po­nent video. I fig­ured at that price; I just had to check it out, so last night I headed over to Tar­get and found the player hid­den in the back cor­ner of their “elec­tron­ics” sec­tion. The shelf model was a decent, blue color but all 4 of the remain­ing boxed ver­sions were a nasty neon-orange color. I also found that Tar­get was sell­ing them for $59.48 and oddly enough; the boxes weren’t sealed. In fact, while I was stand­ing around there debat­ing whether or not to actu­ally buy the thing, I decided to open one of the boxes up and look through it. The player and all of it’s acces­sories were wrapped up in plas­tic bags and shut inside of a clear, plas­tic shell. I looked over the owner’s man­ual and at the hookups on the back of the player, con­firm­ing that this cheap, lit­tle player actu­ally had com­po­nent video. It did, so I bought the unit and a generic com­po­nent video cable. I bought this generic cable, as the player only comes with an RCA audio/video cable and I opted not to spend the money on a bet­ter cable because I doubt the player will put out suf­fi­ciently good video sig­nal to make it worth invest­ing in a pricier cable.

$59.48 | Philips DVP320F DVD Player
$09.99 | Generic Com­po­nent Video Cable
—————————
$69.47 | SubTo­tal
$03.48 | IA Sales Tax
—————————
$72.95 | Total Cost

When I got home; I imme­di­ately started hook­ing the player up to the rest of my A/V gear. I was expect­ing this to be the most painful part of the whole deal, but the com­po­nent video cable let me plug the player directly into the empty plugs on the back of my TV (my other DVD player only has S-Video out) and there was an empty set of audio inputs on the my amplifier/stero unit. Plus there was still 1 free power out­let on the surge protector! :)

There’s a cou­ple of things I should men­tion at this point:

• This is a cheap player and some of those cost sav­ings really show. One in par­tic­u­lar is the back panel of the player where all the hookups are; this panel is a thin sheet of plas­tic and I could feel it flex­ing like it was going to break as I attached the power cord.
• The remote is only slightly larger than a credit card and thin­ner than a CD jewel case; but don’t let the small size fool you, they packed a lot of but­tons on to this lit­tle remote. This is both good and bad. Good in that the remote has lots of fea­tures; bad in that to do so all the but­tons are equally tiny. Some addi­tional notes about the remote:

• The remote is made of a cheap plas­tic and feels like you could crush it with hardly a thought.
• The remote is pow­ered by a flat bat­tery (like those used in watches) and that in and of itself isn’t a bad thing but open­ing the bat­tery com­part­ment reveals that the bat­tery is held in place by a cou­ple of plas­tic tongs that are part of the cover to the bat­tery com­part­ment. A much bet­ter solu­tion would have been to have the bat­ter com­part­ment cover a seper­ate piece alto­gether that screws into place, alas Philips didn’t go that route on this player.

After get­ting every­thing hooked up; I imme­di­ately tested out the region hack that had been men­tioned to me. This hack allows you to set your player to what­ever region you desire and you can accom­plish this by:

1. Turn the player on.
2. Open the disc tray, but do not insert a disc.
3. Press 999 on the remote.
4. Press the num­ber of the region you want the player to use (e.g. 0 for no region).

After doing that, you should see a bit of white text appear on the screen in the upper left say­ing…
Region: 0 or what­ever region that you were switch­ing the player to. Unfor­tu­nately, I didn’t have any non-region1 DVDs handy to test with, so I can’t say for absolute cer­tainty that this works now but I feel con­fi­dent that it does. What I did have handy was the next disc in The Avengers — The Com­plete Emma Peel Megaset. I popped it in and started play­ing it. The video qual­ity seemed pretty good to my eyes, but then I was watch­ing remas­tered copies of 1967 color tele­vi­sion; so your mileage might vary.

Some addi­tional notes:

• The DVP320F spins up much faster than my old DVD player.
• The remote as a but­ton that takes you directly to the root menu of the DVD. I haven’t tried it on a lot of discs yet, but it seems to work pretty damn well (hope­fully allow­ing you to skip the “enforced” trailer watching).
• The player offi­cially sup­ports nor­mal DVDs, DVD+R, DVD+RW, Audio CDs, VCD, SVCD, Photo CDs, discs with straight MPEG files burned to them. Rumor has it that DVD-R discs will work too.
• Unlike my old player, when you pause your movie on the DVP320F; it leaves a still image on the screen (my old player switched to a stu­pid graphic which looked like a piece of movie film and writ­ten on one of the frames was Inter­mis­sion. I’ve always hated that about my old player.
• The DVP320F has a zoom fea­ture that will zoom into the cen­ter of the screen about 8 times and when and can zoom out to show more pic­ture up to about 1/16 err… “anti-zoom”. Unfor­tu­nately, there’s only one but­ton for this fea­ture; so you have it press it mul­ti­ple times, cycling through all zoom modes if you want to get back to the reg­u­lar 1/1 zoom setting.

If I get a chance and the incli­na­tion; I’ll see about tak­ing some pics of the player and adding them to this post. Of course, peo­ple mak­ing requests increases the odds of me doing this…