Sony SLV-D350P DVD / VCR Combo
"What a Piece of Junk!"
\\"What a piece of Junk!\\"  <br />--Luke Skywalker <br /> <br />\\"She'll make .5 past light speed...She may not look like much, but she's got it where it counts...\\" <br />--Han Solo <br /> <br />Well, first impressions are sometimes right on the money, though they may not appear that way initially.  As the above quotes from Star Wars indicate, The Millenium Falcon in Episode IV appeared to be a piece of junk, but looked like that was just an appearance as the ship performed marvelously during that first chapter of the story.  Of course, in the following chapter (Episode V--The Empire Strikes Back) we quickly learned that Han Solo's defective hyperdrive was in fact the Sony SLV-D350P DVD/VCR Combo:  The ship mysteriously was barely able to fly, and our Star Wars heroes found themselves in hot water over and over again---thus justifying Luke Skywalker's initial impression.... <br /> <br />So Let's be clear:  The SLV-D350P IS a piece of junk...although like The Millenium Falcon, did not appear to be at first based on its performance.  I've owned this unit for about a year now, and during the first few months it played all my DVDs without incident, even longer movies that seemed to have more information compressed onto each disk such as The Lord of the Rings Extended Editions.  The first sign of trouble occured about 120 days into ownership (notice that the 90 day warranty had already expired...!) with my Seinfeld DVDs.  Disks 1-2 in each season's collection played fine, but then disks 3-4 broke down, froze, skipped, and would not play the final 2 episodes or any of the special features on disks 3-4, ON EACH SEASON'S COLLECTION!  Weird!  I thought for sure this was a problem with The Disks and I went and exchanged the disks on more than one occasion, but continued to experience the same problems!  Now, over the last several months, the playback problems have continued to worsen:  Various movies will play without incident, and other movies/collections won't play at all.  Also, like some of the other reviewers have mentioned, the picture can be very dark on most of the movies IF the player decides to play them without freezing up or breaking down completely....I also agree with everyone about the confusing and complicated remote, although that blow would have been softened had the prime function of DVD playback not been so frustrating and infused with agony and anger these past few months.  I have yet to experience any problems with the VCR, but I'm not keeping this piece of junk around long enough to find out if that is also going to start to fail!  All of this is a huge black eye for Sony, whom I've never had any problems with before....The least they could do is put a sticker on the SLV-D350P box that reads:   <br /> <br />\\"WARNING:  This box contains a DVD/VHS player which holds a special gremlin inside who will hatch after the warranty has expired and become extremely reckless and playful with some if not most of your DVDs and/or VHS tapes....Although which specific types of DVDs and/or VHS tapes is entirely up to the individual disposition of the gremlin....and no two SONY gremlins are engineered to be genetically identical...yet.\\" <br /> <br />Oh well...Some things have to be learned the hard way...but hopefully some of you out there won't make the same mistake that Han Solo and I did when we purchased the SLV-D350P for our respective purposes.   <br /> <br />Finally, you should also bear in mind that the VERY FEW POSITIVE reviews here and on other sites should scare you away even more from this piece of junk:  The fact that there are ANY people out there who have had a great experience with this horror of a product is only a testament to the tempermental and highly destructive individual nature of these various SONY gremlins at work.  Actually, those individuals would be wise to check around their homes to make sure that the gremlins did not move on to anything more substantial when the box was first opened.....