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| Brand: Philips
Category: CE
Buy Used: £39.99
Avg. Customer Rating:  75 reviews
Sales Rank: 1035
Media: Electronics
Shipping Weight (lbs): 5.3
Dimensions (in): 22.5 x 13.7 x 3.3
MPN: DVP5960/05
Model: DVP5960/05
EAN: 8710895940146
ASIN: B000G2Y59E
Release Date: December 4, 2006
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 Very happy especially for the money May 26, 2008
Believe it or not this is my first ever DVD player! I've been buying DVD's for years & watching them on a computer. Never got round to buying a stand alone player, despite the fact that they have been cheap as chips for some years now. But just recently I bought as nice HD ready LCD TV (26" LG LC55) & thought it was about time I finally bought a DVD to hook up to it. I was looking at a Blu-Ray player but they are still a bit on the pricey side at the moment so I started looking at standard DVD players. I had no idea that you could now buy non HD players that had HDMI outputs & upscaling. I naively assumed that standard DVD players would all still be SCART!
So I ws very pleased to find that there are some very affordable DVD players out there that supported HDMI connectivity. I went for the Phillips based on some of the more positive reviews here. It's a really nice looking unit as well. Very thin & not to many buttons on the front panel so it looks simple & clean. The USB port looks a bit odd on the front but it's becomming an almost standard feature on modern home entertainment equipment & so it's obviously important to have it there for accessibility. To be honest though I can't see that I'd ever use it. Would be useful for displaying photos from a USB device I guess. Not sure about watching compressed video through it though. The player does support a large range of DVD & video formats including DVD/R & DIVX. Useful if you 'obtain' movies online & then burn them to DVD for use in a player. I've never done this so it's not a feature I was particularly concerned with. Might come in handy one day I guess.
The important features for me were the HDMI outputs & upscaling, which I thought would give me the best display on my LCD TV without going to Blu-Ray. I'm very pleased on this front. Image if very sharp & clear, colours are good & contrast is good. Is that down to the DVD player or my new TV? I don't really know enough about this stuff to say! But I'm very happy with the results. Not sure about the upscaling thing though. To me the image looked the same if the DVD player upscaling was on Auto, 720 or 1080. Maybe I'd notice a difference on the lower settings? In any case things look pretty damn good on Auto so that will do me.
Not much else to say really except that it's very easy to set-up & the menu system is easy enugh to navigate. This to me seems like a real bargain for what you get. It's also very easy to make the player region free (following a simple procedure found amongst the reviews on this page), which is good as I have some DVD's from the states. I think I read some reviews that mentioned the remote was a bit dodgy. I've had no problems. Works a treat & it's a very compact & neat remote unlike some I've seen being just short of a foot long with more buttons than a 747 cockpit. So for me it's all good really. Very happy with the whole package. Especially for the price.
A great package at a bargain price & a perfect stop gap until Blu-Ray players come down in price (both the players & the media, which at the moment seems to be roughly about 3 times the cost of stanadard DVD's). Seems to me that at the moment a decent arrodable HD ready LCD TV + a budget DVD player with HDMI outputs & your getting someway towards the Blue-Ray experience anyway being that the imge is very sharp, bright & clear. Of course Blu-Ray will be that bit sharper, brighter & clearer but at many times the cost I can afford to wait a while for that sort of clarity ;-)
brilliant but won't support packed bitstreams May 11, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
great player - the usb port is particularly useful because you can plug in an external hard drive and play directly from it - but there is a jerky playback when the movies are packed bitstreams so you have to make sure they are unpacked beforehand (use MPEG4Modifier to do that) - also sadly doesn't support beyond 8 character names - but all in all a good player for the price
Excellent DivX/Xvid Player with Excellent Subtitle Support April 26, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I'm going to compare this player with a Tevion Xvid player I bought from ALDI a few years ago to illustrate how good this player is.
The Tevion player skipped when playing RW discs, this Philips player does not. This Philips player will play movies that the Tevion player could not - movies that would appear blocky and full of artifacts (bacause of imperfect encoding) on the Tevion play without flaws on the Philips (naturally this is not always the case).
The Philips support for subtitles in DivX/Xvid files is good to excellent: on the Tevion, for example, the letters of .srt subtitles were pure white, and would disappear into a white background making them impossible to read. On the Philips machine, .srt subtitles are transparent white on transparent grey, which means you can read them in dark or light scenes (although they're not perfect and in high-contrast situations, the subs can still be somewhat difficult to read, though not impossible), however, this player also supports .sub files (unlike the Tevion) and they appear like regular DVD subtitles - solid white with a black stroke - in short, perfect.
Also, when playing video files, fast-forwarding and rewinding is perfect (although the rewinding seems to go much faster than when going forward) and the video plays perfectly after resuming play, with no loss of audio/video synchronisation - my Tevion would drop out the image to catch up on the audio on resume of play, this player sometimes has slightly stuttered playback, but image and audio are always present (OK, not perfect, but really of little consequence).
A cool aspect of the player is the ability to create on-the-fly slideshows with music: navigate to the music file you want to play on your USB drive (for example) and start playing it, then navigate to the folder with your images, and start playing them - the player will continue playing the music files in the background. This can also be used to set a single static image while you listen to an mp3 album: play the music folder, then go to the image and play a single image with repeat - result: music with a set image of your choice on your TV screen.
The image slideshow function is adequate, although the transition is set to a downward swipe - I would have preferred a slightly less cheesy fade effect.
I can't comment on the HDMI aspect and I don't have a HD TV.
My only real gripe is the lack of USB 2 support. On a player that supports HDMI I would have thought USB 2 would have been standard. It's a shame and means that the banwidth isn't really high enough to stream video without judder from a USB stick or drive. (Seriously, who uses 1.1 these days?)
Other than that, I have been comntinually impressed with the functions of this machine - from a quick start-up time, smooth Xvid playing, and excellent subtitle support (press the subtitle button to cycle multiple languages, even, on xvid video) with many subtitle formats supported, to good support for any format of DVD disc (+R/RW & -R/RW) this really is an excellent stand alone player that I would have no hesitation on recommending to anyone.
 not recommended April 26, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
very poor,not built well,better spending money on a fine whisky,at least you get more out of it,does not like some disks,will not play extras on some disks,like other reviews like to freeze which is so annoying,try another brand,just placed an order for Sony at Amazon,so hope that is better,one or two disks-not burnt say bad disk which is a load of crap,please get your act together Philips
Does what it says April 25, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Haven't played around with it much yet, but it looks good, sets up easily and upscales which is what I wanted. Got it on a 42" LCD and DVD's look pretty good, though I can't see that much difference to be honest, would need to compare a normal DVD player side by side playing the same film (which I might just do if I get bored enough one Sunday)
Couple of minor negatives, DVD tray seems a bit flimsy, it is a bit slow changing chapters etc and noisy (not during normal playback) and the remote does need to be pointed directly at it to work. But for 40 these things are to be expected and dont detract from a good product. Still gets 5 stars.
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