Panasonic DVD-CV52 5-Disc DVD Player
Decent player with flaws
I've had the CV52 for about 9 months and I am generally pleased with its performance.  Before I go into details, I should let you know what I was looking for from the unit.  I got it to add a DVD player to my home theater and to replace a 5 disc carousel cd player.  I specifically picked this model because of its mp3 capabilities, considering I already have a few dozen mp3 cds burned for my tdk mojo portable player.  I've also tried out VCDs on the unit.<br />As a DVD player, the unit meets all my admittedly lax standards.  I have no need for progressive scan, and the picture is certainly crisp enough for my 29&quot; TV.  It's got all the features I would want or need, including variable speed fast forward and reverse, zooms, subtitles, and dozens of other things I've never used.  The only annoying thing is that you have to use the remote to select the disc (no direct disc access, in marketing speak).<br />As an mp3 player, the unit is more lacking.  It doesn't support id3 tags, which is a very basic function that any mp3 player should include.  But far worse than that, the chip is so basic that it will only play mp3s that are encoded with specific codecs.  If you are ripping your CDs yourself this is no problem, but it is a pain if you are grabbing mp3s from the internet or if you've already encoded your CDs in a different codec.  Specifically, it will correctly play mp3s created with the Fraunhofer codec and the Radium codec.  It won't play files created with LAME, the free encoder.  Luckily for me, my mojo has the same problem, so I had already been using Radium when I bought this unit.<br />The mp3 interface is pretty robust, although not as good as my mojo.  You can select songs on the TV, which is a cool feature.  As long as your mp3s are organized in logical directories, you'll have no trouble selecting songs.  The sound quality, if the files are encoded properly, is decent at 128k and good at 160k or 192k.  I'd put it at better than radio quality and slightly inferior to CD (or even rivaling CD depending on what type of music it is).<br />The unit also plays VCDs well.  If you feed Nero (burning software) some MPGs and tell it to create a VCD, it will play nicely in this DVD player, although the picture isn't great (a limitation of the VCD format).  The unit technically does not support SVCDs, but if you use the &quot;SVCD header trick&quot; (search the internet to find out more), it will play correctly with a much clearer picture than a VCD.  I've had it work every time I've tried it, but YMMV of course.  Alternatively, I've heard that you can convert an SVCD to an XVCD, but I haven't tried it.<br />I haven't had any trouble with the unit reading media, and I've given it CDRs, CDRWs, and DVDRs. I haven't tried burning mp3s onto a DVDR, though, which sounds interesting.<br />There are several complaints in these reviews about the user interface, but I think the problems are overstated.  Some things are not particularly intuitive (you have to press stop twice to get a disc out), but they are not complex.  To play random mp3's from a single disc, you turn off sequential mode; to play from all discs you turn it on.  That's pretty simple.  Note though, when you're playing from all five discs, there is a delay between songs that lasts a few seconds.<br />All in all, the unit has its drawbacks, but it's very cheap and has a lot of features that you would not expect in that price range.