JVC XV-523GD DVD Player
Good player, but not GREAT.
I bought this DVD player recently and had done my research.  I read all of the reviews on amazon, but I have a friend who works in electronics and claims that it is really good and one of their best sellers.  When I first hooked it up, it worked great.  The exterior look of the player was impressive.  At first I thought it looked out of place sitting next to all of my other components which were black, but soon I thought the gold exterior gave the player a nice touch and made it look very fancy and expensive.  The remote wasn't a terrible design either.  It just takes a little getting used to and before long you will be surfing through your DVD's menus.  I even had the player running through my VCR with everything still working perfectly.  At this point I thought all the complaints posted up here were foolish and unreliable.  I almost even got on line to state how wrong everyone was and how great this DVD player was, but I was the one who was wrong.  One evening I decided to watch Happy Gilmore on DVD.  It played fine.  I was watching it only looking away every now and then to look through a magazine.  I then happened to glance up at a point in the movie and noticed a bright flash in the corner of my TV for about a second or two.  I backed up the movie to see if it would occur again, and sure enough, there it was.  I started getting concerned, thinking that the complaints I read about were in deed true.  I tried to think of anything that I could do to test it and make sure it was in deed the DVD player.  The first thing I did was test the DVD on another DVD player to see if I got the same results.  My parents have an RCA DVD player, so I quickly skipped to the section of the movie where I noticed the flash.  Unfortunately, it did not appear.  Strike one.  So that proves it wasn't the DVD.  I then thought that maybe it was because I had the DVD player running through my VCR, so I hooked it up straight to the TV.  Unfortunately same results.  The flash of light was still there.  Strike 2.  I then disconnected the DVD player and hooked it up to 2 different TVs and in both cases the flash DID NOT appear.  So, I came to the conclusion that it was my TV.  I don't know why, but for some reason it didn't like my TV.  It worked fine on the 2 other TVs I tested it on.  I liked this player a lot because it had all the different outputs and features one could want in a DVD player, but I wasn't in the market to buy a new TV just yet, so I am returning it.  This little flash wasn't hugely noticeable, but I knew it would eventually come to bug me and for the amount of money I was spending, I didn't want any regrets.  In all honesty, I would have never noticed this little glitch had I not read the reviews on amazon, so definitely do your research.  This is a good player.  If it works with your TV, consider yourself lucky.  It's not great though because it obviously doesn't work with all TVs.  I personally would recommend sticking with more of a common brand like Sony or Panasonic.  Hope this helps!