Pioneer DV525 DVD Player
The importance of being earnest
The most important consideration in buying a DVD player for me is the colour. What you don't want when you have a black Sony television with matching black video player is a silver DVD player sitting underneath it. That is a bummer. When you're facing it in the chair it ruins the whole look. My mum says it's something to do with Feng Shui. But let's leave the Dutch out of this. I know about aesthetics and it just looks plain screwy when you're sitting there and something ruins the whole tech look of the piece. It makes you look like a cheap bastard. Do I look like a cheap bastard? That's a rhetorical question by the way, you don't have to answer it. Anyway, the problem is solved by buying a black DVD player. Now everything matches. Apart from the name 'Pioneer' which I was forced to scratch off. So I was sitting there admiring my new DVD player when my mum comes into the room and points out the gap between the video recorder and the DVD player. A big gap. The gap looks big because the 'Pioneer' DVD player is thin and the video player is fat. It's a disparity that wouldn't be there if the DVD player was fatter and the video thinner. Anyway, she says the gap is so not Feng Shui. I don't want to hear it. I keep her around to buy me DVD's, not go on and on about Holland. It does bother me, though, so there's definately something in this Feng Shui lark. Anyway, I sent her out of the room to iron some of my shirts so I could check out some DVD's on my new player. <br />Now for the picture quality. Well, the trouble with a daylight scene, is it ruins the general blackness of the unit if there's a streak of white in the middle of the television. It's not such a problem with a film like 'Count Yorga, Vampire', which has a lot of nighttime scenes. With 'The Phantom Menace' there are a lot of scenes set in the desert which you know is very bright. So I didn't purchase that particular DVD. I mostly just watch vampire movies. I stick to wide screen DVD's because that cuts down the amount of distracting white ruining your unit because it has black borders. I won't get a widescreen television because it illiminates that extra black. They're called anamorphic DVD's. I originally thought that meant something changing into something else (hopefully black) but it doesn't. It's to do with distortion. I'm getting more technically minded every day and now I know what's important. The film 'Pitch Black', for instance. <br />I wish in some ways I had bought a Sony DVD player because some models allegedly have a problem with a sign cropping up saying 'No Disk' or 'Dirty Disk' which then causes the player to refuse to play anything. This is great because it solves the problem of white on the screen by leaving you with a totally black screen and hence a totally black unit. But there's a draw back to all new technology and unfortunately mine has no 'No Disk' sign. Well, it does if you genuinely don't have a disk to put in. <br />The picture is sharp and the owls and bats look good. I've painted some cardboard black and stuck it behind the television thus covering the gap between the video and DVD, thus solving the Feng Shui problem. I'm very happy with this player and I think the whole unit looks very good now. Really cool and black.<br />But why is the remote grey?