Zenith ZDA-311 Slim Progressive Scan DVD
You get the bare minimum for your money, if that.
Regardless of whether this is a low-cost model or not, in this age of electronic gadgetry and falling prices on e-componentry, I would have expected this thing to function better. Up until now, I had a neutral-to-favorable perception of Zenith. But this DVD player works as if DVD players were a brand-new concept in which all the bugs have yet to be worked out. I have a seven-year-old Samsung DVD player that works far better than this, and has more features. What exactly is wrong with this Zenith model? Let me tell you.    It is advertised as an MP3 player. You can put an MP3 disk in and it will play, but the player makes an incessant, steady clicking or chirping noise which is quite loud, and intrudes upon the listening experience as much as someone with whooping cough at an orchestral performance. (CD play is acceptable though.) I called Zenith customer support regarding this and the \\"line\\" was that the disk was probably formatted wrong or the brand of disk was not compatible (in other words, blame the disk or the software which created it, not the player). But I tried a variety of MP3 disks in it and it had the same crappy play with all of them; and all of these MP3 disks play beautifully on my other, much older DVD player. But I didn't feel like wasting my time arguing with the support rep (nor was I in the mood to bang my head against a stone wall), so I let the matter drop with their tech support. Mainly I had just wanted to get it \\"on the record\\" with them (if they even keep such records) that their product has faulty performance in this area.    Moving right along, this thing will not play any visual media outside of DVD's. It has the distinction of being one of the rare few DVD players that will not play an SVCD (super video CD). Even my seven-year-old Samsung player recognizes SVCD's, for crying out loud. In fact, this Zenith model does not play any form of Mpeg that I tried, be it Mpeg-1 or Mpeg-2 or what have you. I guess the Zenith team which threw thisthing together have not heard of the revolutionary entity known as the PC. Cross-platform the ZDA-311 ain't. It is strictly limited to straight DVD and CD formats.    And I even have gripes about how it plays standard DVD's. Within several hours of using it, it froze up on a movie, and the only thing that worked was to skip ahead to a later scene before it would play normally again. I tried turning it off, re-inserting the disk, but it persisted in freezing up at the same point in the movie. This happened on a store-bought DVD movie that plays perfectly in my other, older DVD player.    I would have been better served to shell out an extra thirty or forty bucks and gotten something that works properly; and so will you. As for Zenith, after this frustrating experience, they go on my short list of companies to avoid.