Date Created: May 04, 2005, 10:07 PM
by Guest Reviewer: MAD Scientist
I have an addictive and obsessive personality. During my teenage years, I quickly grew attached to two things, comic books and girls. Could have been worse, I could have just been obsessed with comic books.
Worst intro ever.
Let’s start again…so, I just started buying DVD’s. You see, I restrained myself from purchasing DVD’s as A) I didn’t have a DVD player and B) I have an addictive and obsessive personality. ‘(B)’ directly resulted in my collection of 5000+ comic books, accumulated during my teenage years on a typical teenager’s salary at a 7-11. Don’t ask how, I did bad things that my ex-therapist still frets about.
So I started collecting DVD’s and soon after, purchased my first DVD player. A nifty portable with LCD and so forth. Nice for my 27” TV and graduate student lifestyle involving trips around the globe for conferences (as long as the globe only includes Indianapolis and maybe Montreal.) Now, however, I am writing my thesis and am home more often. And lo and behold, my DVD collection is building. In between writing sessions I like to kick back and watch a flick. And each payday I somehow end up at the nearest Target or Blockbuster purchasing a good dozen new flicks to keep me entertained. Like I said, I have an addictive and obsessive personality. Keeping ~200 DVD’s organized started to become troublesome. My cases soon filled up my shelf and new ones just ended up everywhere, since alphabetizing and rearranging my shelf of DVD’s became a nasty chore. I needed my personal space back. So I started to look into some kind of storage unit for DVD’s, you know those ugly metallic towers meant to hold 20-100 DVD’s in all their glory, but would probably serve a better purpose as “modern art” in front of an office building, or courthouse in California where it’d likely end up being the ashtray/urinal for any passerby. Yeah, those things.
Then upon my late night internet searching, I’ve discovered a wondrous invention of modern day laziness: the DVD changer! Behold in all it’s deep space blackness, the color of entertainment technology since the BeeGees were a hit, the storage capacity of several metallurgical sculptures and the convenience of remote technology! But I digress….
Many a late night internet-huntings later, I’ve settled on my DVD changer and below will iterate the thought processes of this addictive and obsessive mind in the choosing of this particular model.
The Hardware:
The Sony DVP-CX985V
is big. I mean like
three XBOX’s big. Wompingly large. If your entertainment center is
less than 22” deep, I suggest investing in a saw. Good thing I use
one of those metal-wire put-it-together-yourself shelfing units you
can find at most office stores. It does, however, take up less
space than my dvd cases, which I now store in my closest. Out of
sight, out of mind. In the picture below, you can see that it
doesn’t look that big. Perhaps I’m exaggerating, but just think how
big something’s gotta be to hold a carousel of 400 DVDs or CDs
(yes, it can play CD’s as well with MP3s on them no less!).
The carousel door seems sturdy enough and opens in a couple seconds. Whatever DVD/CD you were playing last will be spun up to the front. How to properly load DVDs took me a couple minutes to figure out, I didn’t want to break my DVDs nor my newly acquired hardware now. There’s an ever so slight indentation in front of the carousel serving as a track to place DVDs/CDs into. Takes a bit of practice loading disks in but as you probably will be dropping in hundreds, you’d probably learn quick enough.
I loaded my DVDs ten slots at a time, skipping ten, loading ten, etc. If you have less than 200 disks, I suggest you don’t spread them farther than a ½ disk width or about 20 slots wide. One time while the carousel was spinning all the way around (I put my DVD collection sets, i.e. Star Trek: The Next Generation season disks from slot 390 down and regular disks 2 and up such that I have a gaping hole from like slots 200-300), one of the disks fell off the track and was sitting sideways on the carousel. Luckily I heard it fall and quickly opened it up and fixed the DVD back in it’s new home. Just keep this in mind when loading it up.
The remote is a curmudgeon of buttons arcanely labeled. I suggest either reading the manual or get a universal remote that can list your dvd’s or do what I did and keep a printed list of my DVDs and slot numbers. But the remote is nice enough, not much else to say about that aside from that it can seem confusing, but I’ll discuss how I deal with that below.
Usage:
Installation
The unit is surprisingly light; well, before you load it up with DVD/CD disks that is. And finding a nice spot in my center was easy (move over you stinkin’ DVD cases!) I plugged in the power and then the s-video and audio outputs to my TV (which connects to my sound system). Plum easy. It powered up, and I press the mysteriously named “Open” button and voila it opened the carousel. I started loading the disks with slot #2 (slots are labeled every 5 to keep track) as I use #1 for rentals.
Now if you are the type of person that likes keeping lists and labels and documenting everything, this’ll be like x-mas to you. If you don’t, then suck it up. The ease of having all your DVDs at the touch of a remote is worth it. Well if you’re lazy like me.
Loading all the DVDs took me about 2 hours. Have pen, a list of your DVDs on paper, and a pillow ready, ‘cause sitting on the floor for that long can’t be good for your back. Afterwards, you could set the DVD changer to “Load” all your movies. This means that the changer will look for DVD text on the disks. I didn’t do this because I’ve read that only a few disks will likely have this labeling on the DVD. If it does, it’ll read the title onto the changer, which will be shown in the DVD menu system. Additionally, you can plug in a PS/2 keyboard onto the front of the changer and punch up the title of each DVD, that is if it doesn’t have DVD text as that would take precedence over anything you type in for it, so beware. I’ve read that the “loading” of a couple hundred disks takes the changer a few hours.
After loading, I was ready to go.
Remote
Like I said, this thing is confusing. But if you do what I did, and keep all your DVD’s listed (I use DVD Sphere on my powerbook) and printed on sheets, you can disregard about 80% of the buttons. The ones I’ve been using in the past month of ownership include: normal playback buttons (i.e. play, pause, scan, stop, etc), the number buttons, display, the enter button and menu). All I do is look up what DVD I want, turn it on, press display once, enter, the number of the disk, enter, then display to get out of the menu. That’s all, then my DVD loads up in a couple seconds, I kick back and enjoy. This is much quicker than my few trials of the menu system of punching up the folders, then scrolling through all my disks labeled by number just to find the one I want, and entering that. The menu system in this respect is slow, cumbersome, and just not worth it. I suppose that if you took the time to type in each DVD into the changer, it might be nice, but I like my system…so far.
Of note, I plan on investing on a Pronto TSU7000 touchscreen color remote which I can program myself, menu bitmaps and all. If you know me, you won’t be surprised by the style I’ll be programming this in. What’s cool about this remote is that I can write up macros and include shots of the DVD case or whatever to represent the movie and use those as a button to start it up. All I have to do is click and the macro’ll send all the codes for me. As soon as I muster up the scratch for this $700 luxury, I’ll write up a review with shots of my menu system.
Playback
Honestly, I don’t have the qualifications of a videophile to describe how the video quality is in comparison to other players. I have a pretty standard 27” TV and not much else. HD quality is expected in the update as far as I know. So far I’m quite happy with the playback, it’s as crisp as my last dvd player (a portable as I mentioned) and quite responsive to remote or front-button presses. I do notice on disks with layer changes in the middle of the movie a second or less lag during the layer change. Nothing too bothersome, though some might complain that it takes away from the immersion into the movie. So far, I’d say I’m quite satisfied with playback.
As I described earlier, playing a DVD is very simple as long as you keep your list up to date and well organized with slot number.
One thing that irks me, though, is automatic play from startup. If you finish a movie and turn off the changer, upon startup again, the changer will begin loading the last played dvd. Now this is fine if you stopped in the middle of your movie and want to continue again. This sucks however if you just want to start up another DVD. As far as my internet and manual searches has told me, there is no way to turn this "functionality” off, though you may be tempted to think so from the manual’s section on turning “Autoplay” off. Note: this apparently has no relation. There is a trick to keep the player from starting a DVD all over again, however. From any stoppable part of a DVD, press stop then turn off the DVD changer. So when you are done for the night or want to watch regular TV, just get the DVD to a stoppable part, i.e. the credits. This will allow you to quickly dial up another DVD next time you start up without having to wait for the changer to go all the way back to playing the last DVD you watched. (This won’t be a problem once I get the TSU7000 as I will include this into any macro I write.)
Value:
There are other DVD changers out there with better audio and video quality. Some even supposedly have a functional movie menu system like the DV-F727 Pioneer Changer
. However, this sony
unit is one of the most if not the most inexpensive DVD changers I
could find. As I don’t use the changer’s menu system, nor have a
sufficiently high quality audio and video system to warrant HD
output, this is the best DVD changer for me. The quality of the
changer output is good, and the unit itself gives a sensation of
quality. Too be fair however, I haven’t physically compared this
unit to other, as Kenwood and Pioneer changers are very hard to
find in stores. And this coming from a person living in the NYC
metropolitan area!The convenience of having all my DVDs in one unit is just great. All my DVDs are listed with cover, director, date, and brief synopsis as well as slot number in a nicely printed “book.” All my DVD cases are stashed away out of sight. If I ever feel like watching a movie, I got them all in my fingertips. For some, this may not be a big deal, well, a DVD changer ain’t for them then. For the rest of us, I suggest seriously looking into the Sony DVP-CX985V.
Synopsis:
- The
Good
- All DVDs at the touch of a remote.
- Playback is quick and good quality on standard 27” TV
- It’s pretty.
- The
Bad
- Menu system is a mess. But why use it?
- Autoplay on startup is annoying. Just remember to press stop.
- Remote seems to require at least a Bachelor’s in Engineering to decipher.
- It’s pretty big/deep.
Overall: 85%
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