Alden Bates' Weblog

My old DVD player had been giving me a bit of grief for a while now. An aging Philips 711, it had started refusing to play some DVDs and had trouble with others. It was a reasonably good DVD player otherwise, apart from a bizarre design flaw where it was impossible to turn off the on-screen multi-angle icon (it seems to be common with anime DVDs to provide a second angle which contains storyboards).

So on Monday I bought a Panasonic DMR-ES30V VCR/DVD-R combo to replace the Philips and my similarly aging (but still trustworthy) Mitsubishi VCR. So far I'm pretty impressed with it. Though I haven't tried recording to DVD-R yet, taping to VHS works fine, and it didn't have any trouble at all playing the DVDs which my Philips would simply spit out...

The only drawback I've found so far is that it doesn't send video output through the RF out, only via the RCA video out, but that's only a problem for me because of my stereo (it has no remote so I have to lunge across the room to mute the adverts). I may post a more detailed review later.

The time display on the front panel acts as a pretty good night light too. :)