Apex AD-800 Progressive-Scan DVD Player
Disappointing MP3 support
The MP3 support was very disappointing.  It displays a list of all the mp3 files on your disc and you can navigate the list with the arrow buttons (very slowly) and start playing at a particular song.  As far as I can tell, there's no way to tell it to play the songs randomly.  Even worse, the song list stays on the screen the whole time it's playing.  This makes it pretty much worthless for projection TV's which are prone to burn-in.<br />There's also a strange problem with the video that I believe is the fault of the player and not my TV (a new Mitsubishi 55 inch wide-screen HDTV (#55809)).  When displaying a movie, it appears the picture is zoomed in a little too much, resulting in 5-10% of the picture being cut off on all 4 edges.  The only way to tell is to use the panning-and-scaling menus on the DVD player.  Now, whenever I start watching a movie, I first have to pan and scale it until the whole picture is displayed.<br />The unit is also quite large.  I don't understand why they can make portable DVD players not much bigger than a walkman but most of the DVD players are still the size of VCRs from 15 years ago.<br />CON :<BR>Poor MP3 support<BR>Possible screen burn-in while listening to MP3's<BR>Picture zoomed in too much<BR>Large<br />PRO :<BR>Cheap<BR>Has Progressive output