Sony DVP-NS700H/B 1080p Upscaling DVD Player, Black
by Sony
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List Price: Our Price: $49.99 You Save: $30.00 (38%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Category: Home Theater See more product details |
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Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Sony DVP-NS700H/B 1080p Upscaling DVD Player, Black
Customer Review: Very nice, inexpensive unit.
Summary: 5 Stars
I bought this unit to replace a Samsung DVD player I've had for five years. Nothing wrong with the Samsung other than when it heats up the image freezes on the screen then it resumes. It got annoying so I decided to replace it. I looked at Blu-Ray units but the price of the players and the discs themselves is rather high and I'm not ready to make that jump for a minimal gain in picture quality.
After reading all the reviews on this Sony I decided to take the jump. The price was very enticing also. I got the unit a few days after ordering. Thanks for the fast shipping Amazon! I took it out of the box and hooked it to my 52 inch DLP Sony tv using the hdmi cable that I have my satellite hooked up to. At first I was disappointed with the picture as it was very noisy. I unplugged it and hooked up my component video cables to it and the picture was better but not any better than on my Samsung. I left it that way for a few days until the HDMI cable I ordered came in. When the cable came in I plugged it to the tv and the other end to the DVD player. What a difference! I realized I had not plugged in the cable all the way in the first time. The picture is crisp and very sharp. Quite an improvement over the Samsung. What I really liked was all the features this Sony player has. The picture adjustments (5) are two more than what I get with my tv so the wide selection of palettes is great! I can select what I want based on lighting conditions. Since I have skylights in the living room it helps when watching programs or movies during daylight hours. I also like the resume feature when you stop a movie and restart later it will resume where it left off. Some people complained about the speed of the player loading. It's not any better or worse than other players in the market so I'm fine with it. The remote is compatible with my Sony TV so I can turn the tv and the player on and off with it and adjust the volume. Like I said the picture adjustments can also be done on the DVD's remote so if you're looking at one of these it's a bonus to hook it up to a Sony tv. Overall I'm completely satisfied with this unit and I would recommend it to anyone looking to replace or add a DVD player to their home systems but not ready to jump to Blu-Ray yet.
The only complaint would be that Sony still packages this unit with the old RCA type connectors which I just tossed into my extra cable/connectors bag for other uses. As inexpensive as HDMI cables are here at Amazon they should take notice and include the cable at no charge. I bought one from Eforcity here at Amazon for less than $2 dollars. It cost more to have it shipped than the cable itself.
Customer Review: More than just a DVD Player (ultimate music player)
Summary: 5 Stars
I had 1080p upscaling on my PS3, but I moved the PS3 to the game area. So I needed a DVD player for
my 1080p 70" Sony TV. I was quite pleased with the video picture. It is really stunning when you run
SuperBit DVDs in it.
(A SuperBit DVD doesn't have the same compressed picture as a typical DVD. They eliminated all of the previews and behind the scenes garbage and used the entire DVD's storage for picture and sound.)
Although Blue-Ray is stunning, I just can't pay $30 for a movie I can get for $10 that looks really good as well. I ran Disney's Cars side to side via BlueRay and 1080p upscale to compare the formats. There was a lot more dimension and better color on the BlueRay, but not anything that justified 3 times the cost. I keep my BlueRay purchases to just the movies that will benefit the most from the format, for example when Ironman comes out, I will spend the extra for that. (sound is entirely different issue that factors into what kind of speakers and receiver you own).
One thing that gets overlooked with this DVD player is the ability to play music. Most folks don't realize that you can drag up to 700MB of MP3s onto a blank CD-Rom (approx. 150 songs) and play them on this DVD player. That is better than any 5 disc CD player. If you use an application like iTunes, you can burn songs on a DVD-Rom (4.2GB of MP3s) that is almost 1,000 songs.
I always like to tell folks you can burn your entire Xmas song collection on one disc and let it play randomly. The same goes for the entire Beatles collection or every Sinatra song on one disc.
It is really simple to do this, you don't need to be a computer geek to figure it out. iTunes makes it super simple (PC or Mac).
Also note, it you are a tech geek and you have .avi files or mpegs on disc, this will play them as well.
If you have home movies on your computer, just burn them to a CD or DVD-Rom and this DVD player will play them. You don't have to convert them or format them to a "DVD Video". Just leave them as mpegs.
This DVD player is one heck of a machine.
Customer Review: YPbPr Works Just Great
Summary: 5 Stars
I got one of these units, and I've only had it a week, so I can't speak to its reliability. Also (apologies to Amazon) I got it from Walmart, since I wanted a local return in case of a DOA unit. If this weren't a concern, I'd certainly have ordered it from Amazon, because of their excellent service.
This review deals with the "improved picture" issue, and not (as said) reliability. I should first mention the device installed easily and without incident, excluding my having to move a lot of things and uncable/recable a few things, and other annoyances unrelated to the unit itself.
To start, I did a box-out-box-in and just replaced the player. My old player was connected to my TV's Component Video In (CVI) input, so that's where this new one started. If there was any improvement in picture, I didn't notice much, and what I could notice could easily have been chalked up to my vivid imagination.
Now comfortable with that, I decided to move the input to YPbPr. Since this also required setting on Progressive Scan in the DVD Setup screen, I got a little nervous, since turning this on can make the picture so scrambled the DVD Setup screen won't show. I called Sony support, and they walked me through setting Progressive Scan on, and what to do if that didn't work. This is also in the manual, but I wanted a warm & fuzzy from a human being. To summarize, Sony support is there, by both email and telephone.
A day later, I decided to try the YPbPr (480P) connection, and it did wonders. The picture is much cleaner and crisper than before. I also have a DVI input on the TV. At some point, since my TV supports 1080i on the DVI, I'll probably try that. But, frankly, the improvement I saw in YPbPr was, by itself, worth the extra cost over what I had.
So... If you have a TV with YPbPr input (or HDMI or DVI), in my opinion the added price of this unit, compared to a stock-block player, is well worth it. Assuming, of course, it keeps working.
Customer Review: Best of the Pure DVD Players
Summary: 5 Stars
I have gone through several DVD players and determined that Sony is consistently the best brand in terms of quality. I recently purchased they Sony DVP-NS700 as a last minute replacement for my Toshiba dual VHS/DVD player. Unfortunately the Toshiba developed the same malady as my previous Toshiba, which was the same affliction as my initial Philips Magnavox. The problem with these previous players was that they sometimes struggled with some DVDs. Random chapters would freeze or become choppy sometimes loosing the soundtrack all together. For a while I blamed this peculiarity on blemished DVD surfaces or laser-reader head needing cleaning. The truth of the matter was that the laser-reader units in other brands were just not up to tolerances in Sony products. For DVDs failing to operate correctly on other machines I would often retry them on my old reliable Sony player. Sure enough, in most cases, the DVDs would play perfectly.
Our upstairs Toshiba experienced the above-mentioned glitches on a regular enough basis that my son was concerned that his long planned DVD movie get-together would be ruined. In searching for a replacement I stumbled onto the DVD-only machines. Slim, lightweight, and affordable I was able to buy the DVP-NS700 to supplement the living room's sometimes ailing system. Instead of a 100 percent replacement I simply put the new machine on top After I hooked up the player I tried some of the known troubled DVDs on the machine as a test. All played without issue.
The only regret I have about installing the new player is that my two-year old Panasonic HD television does not have a dedicated HD cable hookup. As such I was forced to use the standard three-wire component cables to connect the player to the television. Despite this challenge the picture is the clearest I have ever seen from a DVD player.
Customer Review: Excellent
Summary: 5 Stars
This slim upconverting DVP is a very nice piece of equipment. It produces a beautiful picture from ordinary DVDs. Controls on the "pizza-box" itself are the very simplest, but all you need to show a movie. If you want to play around, or actually study part of a movie--read the titles of books on a shelf, say--the track, motion, angle, step, mode, and other fancy controls are on the remote. The remote can control some non-Sony (BRAVIA) TVs or other units. The NS700H has 5 ways to connect to a TV or AV receiver. Check your TV and receiver and make sure one has available HDMI, or Optical Digital, or at least Component Video interconnects, depending on how old your units are. You'll have to get to the back of your dusty AV and relearn all the plugs and options and cable connections. That's the hardest part of setting up this sweet machine. Or maybe it's time for a new upgrade cycle before the $ sinks out of sight for imported electronics? I had to switch some interconnects around among my pre-existing components, and separately buy the cables to do so since only a lowly Composite cable set is in the box. Plan on juggling the TV, DVP, and any AV receiver controls to get the best enhancement, since their functions may overlap (like sound fields, volume, bit rates).
This single-play DVP, of course, is not a carousel for multi-disk extravaganzas. Nor is it an HD or a Blu-ray player. While it can play most CDs and in-region DVDs, and MP3, JPEG, and some recordable disks, it won't play others, for example, PHOTO CDs, DVD Audio, HD layer on Super Audio CDs, disks from AVCHD DVD cameras, DualDisks, paper labels, or some DRM schemes, among others. Get a peek at the manual if in doubt; the outer box says little about disk compatibility.