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Sony DVP-NS710H/B 1080p Upscaling DVD Player, Black
The Sony DVP-NS710H breathes new life into your DVD collection by upscaling your existing DVDs to 1080p near HD resolution via an HDMI connection. It includes other high-end A/V features such as BRAVIA Sync, which gives you one-remote access and control of your DVD player and other BRAVIA Sync-compatible devices.
Sony DVP-NS710H/B 1080p Upscaling DVD Player, Black Accessories
Sony DVP-NS710H/B 1080p Upscaling DVD Player, Black Reviews
Excellent picture, very good sound, esp with easy to install HDMI. Small and limited controls on remote (eg, no Eject buttom, and difficult to find Zoom). Quiet operation. I paid only $53 with free shipping from Amazon, which also threw in 6' HDMI cable (from another vendor) for just a few bucks more. Very good value, recommended.
After going through 3 DVD players of various brands over the last year, I finally found one that works great. I highly recommend this DVD player. Easy to use, great picture, and reliable.
I own two of these DVP-NS710H/B units; I ordered the second because I thought the first one was dying as it was stuttering and freezing on some of my DVD+R discs. I've been producing my own DVD's (DVD+/-R and DL) for many years and until a year ago, was using an earlier Sony DVD model; the DVP-NS75H. The NS75 unit functioned flawlessly and produced the same picture quality as the NS710 on my 42" 1080i HDTV.
I bought the NS710 as a spare...a backup to my NS75, but began using it regularly until I noticed it freezing up on some Ritek, TDK, and Maxell DVD-R and DVD+R discs. Strangely enough, it was only the inkjet printable discs that caused the problem, and it was several different lots of manufactured discs. But ALL of these discs played just fine in the older NS75! In fact, I have never encountered a disc that hasn't played properly on the DVP-NS75H!
So I purchased a replacement NS710, but to no avail. The discs still skipped and/or froze on the replacement NS710...and would still play fine on the older NS75. Now I have two NS710's that play 95% of my DVD+/-R collection without a problem. I've recently purchased a second DVP-NS75H to keep as a backup.
So, why the backup, anyway? I have a HUGE DVD collection, and these Sony players produce the nicest upscale picture quality that I've seen from an upscale player. My Hitachi HDTV does a pretty nice job on its own, but not quite as nice as these Sony's. I've tried a couple of other brand DVD players (Panasonic, JVC, LG, Toshiba), but I like the features with these Sony's ... ESPECIALLY the multi-disc resume, which remembers the position of up to 6 DVD's. The Slow and Fast Playback WITH SOUND is also nice.
I don't know why this NS710 is having problems with some of my recordable DVD's, but it does. But otherwise, the DVP-NS710H/B's picture quality is outstanding; the deck is solid with nice features; VERY inexpensive. Nice little features, like displaying a dics' TITLE and displaying JACKET_P pictures are also features common to Sony DVD players.
I was completely happy with my new DVD player. I wanted an upscaling player for my new TV and have had no complaints about the quality of the dvds. I even play cds through it.
I've only had this player a couple of days, so I can't speak to reliability. I also haven't read the whole manual yet, so there may be functionality I've missed discovering. I was convinced to buy by the good reviews here and the excellent pricepoint for a player that will make my old DVDs look good on my new giant HDTV. I don't have any Blu-ray discs and don't plan on buying any soon, so this was a good option for an inexpensive upconverting player without Blu-ray capability.
The upconverted video quality is actually slightly better than the XBox 360 I'd been using before (which had convinced me I wanted to invest in an upconverting player in the first place). I checked back-to-back with the opening of the Ratatouille DVD and found the text to be less pixelated and both moving and still scenes slightly clearer with this player.
It has Anynet+ capability when connected with HDMI (an inexpensive AmazonBasics cable), which I didn't realize. This means that my Samsung TV remote can control basic DVD player functions, the TV knows when the player's been turned on and auto switches to its source, turning the TV off will turn the player off, and turning the player on will even turn the TV on.
It's also really skinny, but I guess that's standard these days. My only real complaint thus far is that the power cord is unusually short (by about 6"). Instead of placing it where the old DVD player was, I had to rearrange my components in the entertainment center to put the player in another place so its cord could actually reach the UPS. The button design is kind of stupid, with only very basic buttons actually on the top corner of the unit instead of the front panel. There's no eject button on the remote, but I knew that from other reviews; I still miss it, though, regardless of whether it makes sense. It takes a few seconds longer than my old Pioneer player to power up and open the tray when the eject button is pressed, but its other actions are plenty fast. I miss the nice information display on the Pioneer that showed both track and elapsed time, as well as the audio output channels all on one display, but I can at least cycle through most of the various readings with this one.
It doesn't seem to be able to send Dolby or DTS signals through the TV to my speakers, but that is probably just a misconfiguration or misunderstanding on my part that I haven't tracked down yet. The player itself is amazingly silent. I can't tell there's a disc spinning even in a silent room.
The way this player handles disc glitches is essentially the same as the portable Sony player I have (which makes sense) - it freezes on the last readable image and then scans forward looking for the next readable bit, becoming fairly unresponsive to external commands while it does this. When it finds a playable bit of a second or two, it skips directly there, and may keep searching for the next one if the disc is still glitchy. It's hard to tell that it's doing this, however, and instead of low quality video through the scratches and timer moving to show it's looking like my old Pioneer player would give, you just skip chunks of the film, without having a sense of how much you've missed unless you noted the before and after timer readings.
We tested the slow play option briefly last night, but it's pretty rudimentary - a single button cycles through a range of play speeds, from I think 1.4x down by 0.2x increments to 0.6x, then back to the 1.4x. I need to look at the remote again, but I don't think there's any sort of frame advance/ultra-slow function available.
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