Unreliable
Written: Nov 28 '06
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Pros: It can be tricked or beaten to work.
Cons: Doesn't like to work much.
The Bottom Line: If you only plan to use it for an hour or 2 a week it's fine. If you plan to use it more, forget it.
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| Darkmistress's Full Review: Polaroid PDM-0722 7 in. Portable DVD Player with S... |
I had a lot of titles for this review, but most of them were unspellable because they’re the howling sounds I make when it freezes up … again. Several others were unacceptable because they were naughty words, also uttered when it froze. So I had to settle with the next best thing. We purchased this player because my husband has insomnia and after trying everything we could think of we stumbled across having him watch television. A regular size television worked ok, but not great. When the minidvd players appeared on the market we bought one. He can put a disc in, balance it on his chest and fall asleep. It works out pretty good until he falls asleep so deeply that he rolls over and the stupid thing falls on the floor waking me up. Grrr. Also a different review (Insignia Portable DVD Player http://www.epinions.com/content_226168770180.) This one didn’t last long enough to be dropped on the floor, but just long enough for the warranty to run out.
This minidvd player is a little larger all around than the average 6 disc gatefold dvd set box. It is all silver and comes with a little remote control and a cord that looks about 9 feet long. To lift the screen, you have to press a button in the center of the front and lift. There’s a little latchy thing that is released when you pressed the button. To the left of the front is a slide that opens the disc tray. The control buttons are on the top of the disc tray lid to the right side. Honestly, I normally use the remote, unless I need to change from wide screen to square screen. It’s pretty self explanatory if you should have the miss fortune to own one of these things. The volume dial is on the right side with the headphone, audio and video jacks. Thanks to those jacks, you could, in theory, attach this player to your TV and use it like a regular dvd player. Along the left side is the power switch which I found to be difficult to move. I don’t know what I’d do if I had no fingernails because I usually end up digging in with my thumbnail to get it to move. One of the things I actually like about the design is that the screen swivels. Mostly this is me being silly because, really, if you want to rotate the screen, you can just turn the whole player. It isn’t heavy or anything.
When it works, the operation is simple. Put in your dvd, wait while it starts up and gets to the menu screen. (My husband explained this to me, but I wasn’t paying attention. He’s always explaining this stuff like I care. I know there are correct terms, but I don’t remember them.) If you are watching something wide screen, you don’t have to do anything. There will be black bars across the top and bottom of your rectangular screen just like normal when watching wide screen on a square screen. This sort of baffles me. Why not just make the screen the correct proportions for wide screen? Anyway, if you happen to be watching something filmed for a square screen, you have to hold down the mode button until the screen resizes. When it resizes, you still have black bars along the top and bottom of the screen and now you have bars on the sides too. So here you are, watching a small screen to begin with, made smaller because you have the temerity to want to watch something filmed for a square screen. I bothers me quite a bit because it just looks like a stupid design flaw.
The worse design flaw is the fact that the stupid thing doesn’t work. Or rather, works for a while and then quits. When we first got the player, my husband used it every night for between 30 minutes and an hour. It worked just fine for 3 months, then it started freezing for no good reason. At first we thought the problem was with the discs, but they played fine in other players when we tried them. So we thought maybe it was just fussy with certain discs and then we noticed that it would get “fussy” at different places and on discs that had played with no trouble before. We also tried opening the tray or turning the power off and on so that the disc would start over from the menu. Then it would give me a “bad disc” message and refuse to play that disc at all. The only thing I could do at that point was to put another disc in to “clean its palate” as it were and then go back to the first disc (which mind you, is “bad.”) Once another disc had played, the frozen disc would play.
At that point, we were on our way to Korea and didn’t have time to mess with it. We bought the Insignia player which is still going strong and stashed this one in the storage unit. When we returned, we pulled it out again. A friend has the same player and has never had any trouble with it so we thought we’d give it another shot. I started using it and didn’t have any trouble. I tend to have it playing for 3 or 4 hours at a stretch on a nearly daily basis (I have a lot to catch up on!) It worked fine for about 3 weeks. Then it started freezing up at random. During Regency House alone it must have frozen up a dozen times. The worst was when I was 5 minutes from the end and it froze. I discovered that I hadn’t learned enough Korean swear words to cover my frustration. It’s also started doing a new annoying thing. The disc will just stop spinning. You’ll be watching your thing and you’ll hear the distinctive winding sound of the disc slowing down. This is easier to fix and some what therapeutic. You smack it. Smack the top until the disc starts spinning again. If you catch it fast enough, the film never even slows down. And actually, smacking it in the left side of the top seems to work better than smacking it in the middle. I’ll have to experiment with smacking it on the right.
So, if you only plan to use your player one or 2 hours a week, then the Polaroid will probably work just fine for you. It’s a pretty common looking machine, easy enough to use. If you plan to use it more than that, you could have a problem. You might want to just save yourself a little money and a lot of aggravation and get the Insignia (http://www.epinions.com/content_226168770180). It’s like the Energizer Bunny.
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 150.00
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Darkmistress
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Location: Concepcion, Chile
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