Samsung DVD-L1200 12-Inch Portable DVD Player
Not worth its price
This is the best portable player out there?  Really? I owned this for about two weeks and decided it wasn't worth its price. <br />The DVD player comes neatly packed inside the box with all its accessories mention in the specs except that it comes with a soft leather case. The player has a huge display at 12.1\\" and looks like a laptop when closed. The design is thin and light and can easily be carried around while watching. The gray finish is sleek and looks high-tech but when viewed on bright light the finish looks cheap reminds me of a bad paint job at an auto shop. You can tell around the CD lid the paint is rough makes it look cheap and it also looks like some dirt or dust got in while in the process of drying the paint. Samsungs logo could have looked better if they only embedded their logo in silver like what Sony always does with their TVs.  I'm not sure what kind of factory they have but it looks like they better start paying their workers more and establish quality control.<br />The player was a little hard to open; you can't open the player with one hand. It forces you to open it slowly.  The CD lid feels cheap, it sprang quickly once ejected to reveal its lens.  I looked under it and saw just a thin spring that's doing all that. I imagined in the long run that thing is going to give up. The Power button is coated with chrome which was a good idea. It saves the paint from fading from over used. The only thing annoying about this button is you have to press it several times to turn it off, sometimes pushing it down for a few seconds. <br />The picture quality suffers from bad black level. Imagine watching a movie that takes place in darkness and instead of the night being black it's gray. I tested a couple of CGI animation and it looked too bright that everything looked washed out. Significant lost of detail was obviously lost in bright scenes. Picture adjustments didn't work too well. Low light settings were way too low that a lot of detail in the picturewas lost. Inside light settings provided the picture more sharpness and brightness but edges were exaggerated. Outside settings provided more color to the picture but looked unnatural. Standard was the best picture it provided. <br />The sound quality sounded equalized, music and dialog sounded clear but there was little or no bass response strong enough to scare you on scenes with guns or explosions. Samsung could have provided a small bass module if they could not fit it in the player's thin body. Not even the headphones could deliver good bass and I was using a studio monitor headphones. There is an audio output so you can hook it up to your Home Theatre setup but who the heck wants to do that on a 12\\" screen?  Good for playing music though. The player's mp3 file supports only 8 characters which is ridiculous. you probably have to rename every file to make it readable on the menu. <br />You could plug in your game console to this player or plug in your video camera. Samsung provided jacks but not adapters. You can also use it as a stand alone DVD player but no progressive output. Only the built-in screen has this feature. You can view still images in jpeg format. The slide show lags reminds me of an old 486 computer. quality was okay but not better that my LCD monitor on my desk.<br />Now for the worst part this player still has problems with subtitles. I read some reviews that this was also an issue on their previous models.  I looked in the players menu and found that there was no option to turn this off.  Options are Automatic only and numerous foreign languages to choose from as a default for the players subtitles to display automatically upon inserting a DVD.  Now what's really weird about this is it only happens when the player is plugged in an outlet. But when it runs on battery subtitles remains off. Go figure. A design flaw or maybe just a Korean thing since this player is made in Korea. The Koreans figure it will be very convenient for them since many of them don't speak English. They could have made a Korean version and a US version.<br />The player plays everything as stated in specs. It doesn't support Video CD. I called their support if there was a firmware that can fix this but the guy responded \\"NO\\" and he said it's being phased out.  It's too bad if you have a collection of adult movies on VCDS you won't be able to watch them or hard to find titles not on DVD. <br />I just hope Samsung is listening and fix these problems if they want to be the best. But if you can live with these issues then you will be very happy.