My Samsung player likes to skip around, so I am in the market for a new player. I am looking for a good, objective online source for DVD player reviews. Found a few sites, but they were mostly user reviews. While these are OK, I'd rather stick with reviews of people who do this for a living, so I thought I'd asks the pro's in here where they go.

BTW, I am not in the market for a high end player, probably something less than $200. (Prog. scan, optical & component outputs, MP3 capability)

Any help would be appreciated, thanks.

Steve

Interesting. I always prefer user reviews as they aren't paid by the producers of the product.

This mag does unbiased reviews, though. Here is a link to their progressive shootout. Note that this only reviews the progressive scan capabilities, although that's a big factor for video quality.

[Link: hometheaterhifi.com]

Well, I certainly don't want reviews of Sony products by Sony professionals or any other company for that matter. But sometimes with user reviews you get an unbalanced opinion. Seven people think it is the greatest thing since sliced bread, three others think it sucks and they had to get two replecement units. (I actually saw this with one player I was looking at.) I figure, at least with Consumer Reports or Digest or other similar outfit that does reviews for a living, you should get a more balanced answer.

Anywho, thanks for the link, I will check it out.

dajedikidd: I agree with that as well. Also if it is one person that does all the reviews (or a small hand full) you know they are (if not balanced) slanted in the same way and you know what to dismiss. i.e. I know he thinks X is more important then I do, or I know that if he is saying Y then that there is something definitely wrong (or great depending if Y is positive) because he does not really care about Y

Yes, you need many user reviews to get accurate info. But the bias in most "pro" reviews is worse because people think they are gospel. I esp love when they list specs that they never bother to check. Sometimes specs are slanted or just plain wrong. That's why I like Secrets, the link above. Their testing is detailed, explained, and pretty much over the head of most of us. When they rate the pic high, it's high.

Here's a good example of why I like Secrets, just read the Momitsu review:
[Link: hometheaterhifi.com]
(You'll have to scroll down to it, I can't get the link to work)

I like Consumer Reports on many things, but they have never pleased me with HT (or computers or trucks). They don't bother to have experts, just everyday users, test them. They don't care about quality of sound or pic for the most part, just how the machine works. That's good to a point, you don't want a machine that has silly menus or something, but some of us also care if it has quality playback.

This message was edited by Spiky on 06/29/04 11:46.

Forgot to mention.

Often on a user review site will be a mfgr review. Ignore these. You can usually recognize these because they have the specs copied from the mfgr website directly, sometimes a link! Or you sometimes find it is a reprint of an advertisement.