God punished me, again, for being a cheapskate. I bought an Oritron 100 dvd player for $83 after rebate, and it turned out to be a nightmare. What a piece of junk. Any way, I got rid of it, at a loss, but good riddence.
Now we’re looking for a dvd player. Our VHS to DVD ratio for movies watched is about 10 to 1, but the gap is closing.
I would like to spend under $225, but don’t want a piece of crap. My research shows the RCA to be getting good reviews. I’m especially interested in the model 5215.
Does anyone have an RCA dvd, especially that model? How is it?
This probably won’t be too helpful to you, because off the top of my head I don’t know the model number that I have, but I do own an RCA DVD Player. The picture is really good, and its been able to play every DVD I’ve ever tried on it. The only (minor) problem I have with it is that it is somewhat noisy when it is actually spinning the DVD while you are playing it.
Anyway, for $225, everyone I’ve talked to says that the Sony DVD player (unfortunately, I can’t remember the model number for this one either…I can look it up if you’re really interested) is the best buy. My father has it, and it produces the best picture that I’ve seen.
Apex are great, they are only $99 at circuit city if they are still on sale.
RCA makes the most worthless crap & I can’t tell you how much of their stuff I have to throw out. I got a new tv from RCA, A Proscan, recently only because it was dirt cheap loaded with features but let me also tell you that I bought a three year warrentee on that thing for an additional $48 at CC. Don’t buy RCA dvd unless you can get a full warrentee for at least two years, which is when you might want a nother type of machine because they come out with better features.
Our DVD player is an RCA model to go with the TV and VCR. It’s great, and the only thing that I regret about getting it is that it doesn’t have a composite out which would be useful for the digital TV.
I’ll just say here what I’ev said before about RCA in other threads:
[vomits]
Ahem. Now then, I serviced consumer electronics for over ten years and RCA was just not made very well IMHO. All chassis were genuine 100% polystyrene* and would bend & deform out of shape easily. (One case I remember fondly involved a cheaply made carousel CD unit that was ever so slightly warped out of alignment - and therefore didn’t play properly - whenever any weight was placed on top, such as another stereo component. Stereo components are supposed to be stacked, you say? I guess not if they’re RCA.) Gears would break away from subchassis because the gear spindle was small & weak. Circuit boards held in place with hot glue a la Martha Stewart instead of screws. Displays driven by ordinary lamps (that burn out after a few months) instead of using fluorescent tubes. 99% of internal parts are generic & there was a very broad tolerance in component values. I could go on & on.
When any RCA product was brought to my bench for service, I prayed that a service warranty was attached to the claim so I could just declare the unit a write-off & chuck it into the garbage without further ado. The customer was then issued a store credit to buy a replacement. Of course they could’t buy anything other than another RCA (without chipping in an extra $50 or more) because the original purchase price on the first one was so low to begin with.
I received a JVC 3 disc changer for Christmas (which I believe sells for around $200), and so far am very happy with it. JVC is a brand I do like & have always had good experience with both on the outside & inside.
[sub]*I don’t know if it was actually polystyrene, but it was some similar kind of cheap flexible plastic such as you might find your free happy meal toy made from.[/sub]
I understand that most of the mass-market brands (eg RCA, ZENITH, GE, MAGNAVOX) have their low-end models made by one or more of the korean or Singapore/China based subcontractors (like Great Electronics, LG, or such). This practice of rebranding makes me wonder if you gain ANYTHING by paying for a brand name! I say this because i used to work for Philips/Magnavox-at their plant in Tn, the line would spit out 5 brands-Philips, Magnavox, Philco, Crosley, and Curtis-Mathes-all the same insides-only the prices were different!
You’ve hit the nail squarely on the head. You’ve also managed to pick out the other brands that push the bile to the tip of my throat; I refrained from mentioning them simply because it would have been straying from the topic at hand and you all know that I never do that ;). I might include: Grand Prix (GPX), soundesign (unless it’s for your pre-teen children) & Koss.
I’ve had a RCA 5210P DVD player for about a year and a half. I believe that this is last year’s model and has been replaced by the 5215. It worked fine for awhile (picture quality was decent), but recently it stopped recognizing some of my dual-layer format DVDs and DVD-ROMs. I’ve seen reports that other people have had similar problems six months to a year after purchase.
As a side note, I’m looking at replacing my player with a Pioneer C503. Anyone want to comment?
I don’t see a C-503 on the Pioneer web site, but in general like their stuff (with the possible exception of their basic model amplifier a few years back that had a habit of blowing up), especially their car audio. They have a DV-C603, if that’s what you’re planning on buying I say hubba hubba zing zing it’s got everything.
I used to have a Pioneer 414, and just bought the Aiwa 370… It’s great. I got it for $200, and here are the benefits it has over my old player:
It can be hacked to let you select the region with your remote! No risk or damage! The best.
It has a zoom feature. A neat toy.
Layer changes times, so annoying on the 414, are now GONE.
I have no complaints about the picture and sound, and the reviews I read from tech-heads were generally strong. Get this player, I say.
The Apex may be cheap, but I heard the all-region feature that made it so popular has been removed, and it is generally considered a mediocre player otherwise. You get what you pay for.