Sony DVP-S530D DVD Player
Poor quality; a blemish on the Sony name
I have owned this player for approximately 3 years and have learned all (or at least most) of its foibles. There are several major problems you should be aware of with this unit:<br />(1) Lip synch problems. The audio and video streams will unpredictably go out of synch from time to time, requiring you to stop the dics and restart to get the streams back in synch.<br />(2) Noticeable video artifacting (jaggies, combing, moire, etc.) on ordinary DVD discs that have scenes with \\"difficult\\" MPEG encoding.<br />(3) Poor handling of many discs with extremely subtle scratches. One disc we rented (Talented Mr. Ripley) was so bad that the Sony S530D would not play an entire chapter of the movie. However, the el cheapo DVD player in my dinosaur laptop computer playerd it without incident.<br />(4) Most of the time, the player spontaneously turns itself \\"off\\" about ten seconds after you turn it \\"on\\".  When I turn it \\"on\\" a second time it stays \\"on\\" properly.  It doesn't matter if there is a DVD in the tray or not, or if you turn it \\"on\\" from the front panel or with the remote<br />(5) Slow transition from one DVD layer to the next.<br />In short, buying this machine was a bad idea when it was first introduced. Today, there must be literally scores of better models out there. Buy one of them instead.