The right DVD player for you?
Written: Aug 15 '02 (Updated Aug 15 '02)
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Pros: Great picture quality, lots of video options, NOW a good value
Cons: Scan is very touchy, lifespan is shorter than some, poor customer service.
The Bottom Line: Affordable. A really good entry dvd player. Slight reliability issues but that may be limited to just me. About the same quality as equally priced dvd players.
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| zlmajors's Full Review: Sony DVP-S360D DVD Player |
When I had bought my sony DVP-S360 DVD Player, I had done a lot of research online and with other resources (including consumer reports). I personally thought the world of sony, and I still do, but I think now that even a great company can make a few mistakes in the execution of a given product. Ultimately after I have given myself time to cool down that is what I chalk my problems with the DVP-S360 DVD Player up to, mistakes in the final product. Please read on and you'll see what I loved about this dvd player and what I didn't.
PICTURE QUALITY
The DVP-S360 DVD Player gives a picture quality that I have not seen bested, at least by my eyes, even by dvd players that are hundreds more. This says a lot about sony, they really did make this player into a fun to watch machine. There are also a lot of different screen options available. One of these options that I accidently turned on that I didn't mean to was the letterbox option, I managed to do this one week after purchasing it and it took me about 2 more to figure out how to turn it off. To me the fact that it did have that option (for all you die hard movie fans) did speak a lot about sony's mindfulness towards the people that buy sony products.
Menus
Like a lot of sony products the DVP-S360 DVD Player has a ton of options for your viewing pleasure. So many so that I never used some of them. This selection of options is great because each person who uses it will require something particular to their interests, be it doby surround sound, or captions or whatever your bag of chips may be.
REMOTE CONTROL
Remember when I said a lot of options? Well the remote follows this mantra to a T. Yes you can do just about anything in the world from the remote, in fact if you lose your remote you will be stuck doing things in a very tedius manner from the front of the dvd player. This is a weakness in my mind because I happen to lose remotes all the time. For others it may not even come up as a problem at all. The buttons on the remote are also a bit small, I'm a big guy (6'3" 225 pnds) and I would often hit the wrong buttons by mistake.
Lol I just realized you might not fully understand me. I love sony products, I have a sony 27" wega tv, a sony stereo, and then the DVP-S360 DVD Player. They all have very similar remotes, so I'd pick up the dvd remote trying to change the channel and mess it up. Yes this can be solved by buying a sony universal remote, but I can't put my digital cable onto that remote. Wouldn't be a problem for most but it was for me.
RELIABILITY
Ok this is a sore spot for me but I'm going to try to be as non-biased as possible. My DVP-S360 DVD Player was bought in March of 2001, and I had no problems with it for just over a year. In May 2002 it started freezing up while it was playing a movie, I thought that it could just need a cleaning and put it on my list of things to do. Well at the beginning of June whenever I put a dvd into it, it gave me the signal "no disk in". It wouldn't play anything because it didn't know that there was a disk in it. Frustrating to say the least. I'm sure that there are many people that have had the DVP-S360 DVD Player and have no problems with it for two or three years but for me it lasted only a year. I later found out it was the laser reader (I forget the technical name for it) and that it would cost $194 to fix. Being that now the DVP-S360 DVD Player can be bought for $100, well that isn't exactly a great deal LOL.
CUSTOMER SERVICE
Now this is the first time I have ever included customer service as a section of a review, and it was the most "head itching" part of my experience with the DVP-S360 DVD Player.
Once I discovered it wasn't just the lense needing cleaning or realligning, I called sony, after about a 20 minute wait I got through to one of their customer service reps. I explained to him the problems and he said that I needed to send it to them, that the problems happened while the dvd was under parts warranty but not labor.
And this is the head itching part.
The labor would cost $125 dollars. This $125 was a flat rate fee they charged for repairs. I asked him why would I want to send a DVD player into them to have it repaired for $125 when I could buy a new one for $100? His response was that he didn't know but he still gave me their address and ticket number in case I wanted to send it in (I guess in case I was sentimentally attached to THIS DVP-S360 DVD Player).
The part of the customer service that leaves a sour taste in my mouth was that if I hadn't known this dvd player cost NOW $100 I would have probably sent it in, without them ever telling me the average selling price. This would have been because when I bought it, it cost me $225.
CONCLUSION
For $100 right now you can get a high quality sony dvd player. For about that you can get the entry level toshiba, panasonic, magnavox, rca etc etc. I hate to admit it but from my experience you might want to heavily weigh the options and benifits of the other dvd players. I can't give it BAD marks because it is a good dvd player. But I (and remember I am a big sony fan, tv's, stereos, cameras etc etc) but I don't think I will be buying another sony dvd player.
I know I might not seem totally unbiased but I really did try to give the pro's of the DVP-S360 DVD Player and the cons equally. After reading a lot of the other reviews of the DVP-S360 DVD Player I might have to make the conclusion that I just got that rare lemmon.
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 225
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Epinions.com ID:
zlmajors
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 - Top 1000 |
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Member: Zach Majors
Location: Portland, OR
Reviews written: 62
Trusted by: 16 members
About Me:
Husband and father, picky when it comes to products for my family or myself.
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