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08 Oct, 00:00
EDITED TO SAY:
Despite giving this a good review shortly after I bought it in late 2003, further experience proves the machine to be faulty and Apex to be a flat-out bad company to deal with.
While the player worked and never got too hot, the battery completely burned out with not much use. It developed a burning electronics smell.
Player screen showed black & white movies in charming, old-fashioned sepia and color movies in Christmasy red/green. Moving the hinged screen up or down might or might not adjust the color, but no guarantees here. Worst of all, the remote broke within a couple months of use. Ummm, the remote controls EVERYTHING. I could only hit play. Good enough...at least I could watch most features. After a year, I decided to spring for a new remote. Twenty-two bucks plus ten for shipping! Bite the bullet. I gave Apex all my shipping information. No remote after a couple of weeks. Call Apex. Oh, we don't have your shipping address. Give it again. Another couple of weeks. Call from Apex: please supply your shipping information. Beleive it or not, I went one more round with these clowns before cancelling and giving the whole kit and kaboodle to my engineer father. Maybe he can figure something out here. In the mean time, I bought a Samsung L-70, which functions beautifully, has a great, crisp screen with consistent colors, weighs almost nothing and is the size of a paperback book. And I haven't needed to use the remote a single time. All that for ten bucks past the Apex PD-10 price.
DON'T BUY APEX!! Sadly, I cannot edit my star rating to zero.
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My Previous Review:
Good little system, October 8, 2003
Nope, it's not a 16:9 display. The picture is deceptive, it looks widescreen in the illustration. That aside, this isn't a bad little machine at all. I bought it to run movies at work as background noise. I've had it for a week and it's getting heavy use every day. The image quality is good as long as you are not trying to view from an extreme angle. Since it's a personal system, that isn't much of an issue. The sound with headphones is good and I was surprised at how clear the speakers were the one time I didn't use headphones. It did freeze up on me a couple of times, but I restarted the disk without trouble. I don't find that it's getting excessively hot. There is quite a bit in the package, which is nice: earbud headphones, car power adapter, ac pwer adapter, battery, tv connector cables, remote. Some other systems make you buy some of those separately. I'd velcro the remote to the unit so it doesn't get lost, since it's necessary in order to access menu items...don't want to lose it. Added bonus: it plays BOTH NTSC and PAL formats. Wish I'd had this when the Buffy DVDs had only been released in the UK. All in all, what you get for the price is pretty good. I recommend this as a good, no-frills, economical portable dvd player.
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