Philips DVP5982 1080p Upscaling DVD Player

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I purchased this DVD player for watching films from Germany. The instructions for unlocking it with the remote are very simple:

press Setup
select the Preference Tab
Press 1,3,8,9,3,1
Press up/down key to select "0"
and hit menu to exit.

After you do that, you can buy foreign films from amazon.de or other international Amazon websites, and watch them on this player. Very nice and a very nice price.

I should perhaps preface this review with the fact that I don't use this device as a media center; I stream my video and audio files through my Xbox 360. I am reviewing this purely on its performance as a DVD player.

This is a pretty solid little device. It's light and thin, having a fairly attractive and sleek appearance with its black finish. The upscaled image looks great on my 32" Samsung LCD with great color reproduction through the HDMI connection, though occasionally red objects seem to suffer from interlacing artifacts -- this mostly occurred on older, non-anamorphic DVDs, but it was a small concern and deserves to be noted.

More aggravating are the startup and menus. They're slow, bordering on painfully so. It takes a good ten to fifteen seconds for the tray to open when starting the machine via the "Open Tray" button. The menus often have a slight delay when navigating them, which can occasionally result in highlighting the wrong choice.

My biggest beef lies in the HDMI audio out. Due to a limitation with my television, I have to rely on the coaxial audio out to receive surround sound on my stereo system. Some hiccup inside this player constantly changes my settings back to HDMI audio out, which does me no good; even worse, it's not consistent, as sometimes my settings are left undisturbed, but mostly, once the player's been off, I need to readjust when I turn it back on. Thankfully, the setting has never reverted during playback, but it is a bit of an annoyance nonetheless.

As this review focuses on concerns about the device, you're probably wondering about the rating. Honestly, I wasn't expecting the greatest player on the market when I paid $50 for it, and the video quality has always been satisfactory, often exemplary. While it does have its foibles, the Philips DVP5982 does get the job done and is extremely affordable.

I suppose a truly accurate rating would be 3 1/2 stars.

PROS: (1) Reads 100% of DVDs from anywhere in the world, originals or copies, DVD, VCD, audio CD, MP3, etc. (2) Super slim, and nice design.

CONS: (1) incompatible with most external hard drives. (2) too slow: takes 10-15 seconds for the lid to open.

I purchased this very inexpensive DVD player as my older Samsung unit would not play jpeg disks or mp3 files. With the supplied HDMI cable, hookup is as simple as plugging one end of the cable into the unit and the other into the flat screen TV. The image quality is spectacular--I never expected my digital pics to look so good! For the $60 or so I paid for this unit, it is a fabulous bargain. I'm sure you can spend more for a unit with lots of bells and whistles, but if you want an inexpensive, simple unit that does a super job with all formats--you cannot go wrong here.....by the way, I have taught university physics and optics so I'm not a total amateur in the area.