Sony DVP-NC555ES ES 5-Disc DVD/SA-CD Player
It's good, but...
This is supposedly Sony's \\"top-of-the-line\\" dvd player. The panel controls are minimalist (featuring a useless chapter skipping KNOB?!?!). The picture quality is very good. I have a REAL problem though with the remote. It feels CHEAP. The first dvd player I ever bought was a Sony single-disc DVP-S500D player. It cost about as much as this one, yet everything about it was infinitely better designed, especially the on-screen menus. The remote that came with that player, the RMT-D102A, felt heavy, solid, hard, and built-to-last. Unfortunately, with this new player, the remote (RMT-D160A) feels terrible in your hand. The buttons are again, CHEAP. I had to take it back to the retailer because the \\"nipple-stick\\" was off-center and stopped working after only 5 months. Inexcusable. The menus on the NC555ES do not look very good. They take up too much of the screen, and the colors feature way too much blue. There are a number of picture controls that hardly produce any noticeable changes. Not only that, but the responsiveness of menu selections and even the dvd layer transitions are SLOW. This is profoundly disappointing for a name like Sony, and for their ES line...well, it just boggles the mind why the quality has slipped operationally. It also isn't a fully universal player. It does not playback DVD-Audio, only their proprietary technology, SACD. As a loyal Sony buyer, this is a huge disappointment. Spend a little more money, Sony, and produce a better player and REMOTE CONTROL than this.