CYBERHOME CH-LDV 700B 7-Inch Widescreen Portable DVD Player
Ok for the price - battery (life) is a disaster
I bought this device this summer when I was on a vacation trip in the US, especailly for my 2 year old son so I can keep him entertained on the transatlantic flight back to Europe. As these things are cheaper in the US (compared to the Euro-currency) I thought it is no big risk if I buy one under 200$ as I can not return it here once I am back home. So my expectations were not high either as if I would buy a brand name device also at a higher price. One thing however I should have better paid attention to is the handling of the battery. Due to a major 'technical design flaw' you cannot shut off the device completely - you really have to remove the battery physically otherwise it remains in a standby mode and draws power from the battery up to a point where you cannot recharge it anymore. This happened to mine - so now I can run it only on 110 V (here 220 V) or with the car-adapter. But otherwise it works quite well, can also read my self-burned VideoCD (VCD and SVCD). Also a very good feature for someone from Europe: it can be switched also to PAL-TV (the norm for TV here, in the US it is NTSC) and in the menue you can also change the region-code so I can watch the European region-code-2 DVDs here too (to change the region code is an undocumented menue feature and you can find out how to do that that on various internet-forums). Anyway it fulfills its purposes - works fine in the car - and for 200 $ I didn't expect any high-quality features. I give it an average rating of 3 stars - if the battery worked properly it would be 4 stars.