Philips DVD750VR Progressive-Scan DVD-VCR Combo
I get what I paid for
I have to write a review since I felt one of the previous 2 reviews was a bit sweeping regarding ALL DVD players made by Philips. I bought this unit to replace an old VCR. I have only used it for a week, so my impressions may change in the future.<BR>First: one of the prior reviews warned me about the remote control, so I expected problems. And that's why I only gave this product a 3 out of 5: the labels on the controller were hard to read, and the keys were not very intuitive, so I had to play with the keys a lot. In addition, the first-time set up did not work for me. But I was able to get into the setup menus later, so it was a minor annoyance at best.<BR>Second, this is what I liked about this unit: it played a 2 hours long DVD movie with no problems. It also played a commercial Karaoke VCD with no problems. When I got to the page in the manual that claimed this player could read directories and JPEG files, I remembered that I had a CD-R containing a backup of my digital pictures. To my delight, the unit displayed all the pictures in the backup directory that I had burned on my Windows PC. There was a delay of a few seconds between photos, just like a slide show. The picture quality was superb, thanks to the JPEG format. Some dark photos showed up just fine on the TV screen. In addition, I happened to have a computer-made DVD (in DVD+RW format) of some old videos taken via a camcorder. The Philips played this DVD just fine, thank you. So I can view my computer-made DVDs on my TV now. Unfortunately, the Philips cannot improve on the quality of the videos taken: I was painfully aware of the jerkiness in these home videos!<BR>Finally, some of you may not know, but you cannot play something in the DVD section and be able to record that show to the VCR section at the same time. To do that, you'll have to connect the signal to yet another VCR deck.