Axion AXN6070A 7-Inch Portable DVD Player Review

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(More customer reviews)At the same time that I purchased the Axion AXN6070A 7" Portable DVD Player for my kids, I also purchased the Phillips PET824 8.5" portable DVD player for myself. The Phillips is in a different league than the Axion, and if you're a traveler that will rely on the battery life of the portable DVD player, then you definitely don't want the Axion. The Phillips is a bit more expensive, but it has everything and more than you could want out of a portable DVD player.
Both the Phillips and the Axion LCD screens are crystal clear. You lose a little definition as you move side to side (as with most LCD type screens), but nothing too drastic that would warrant a complaint. The Phillips PET824 has an 8.5" screen and the Axion a 7" screen. The 1.5" difference is not dramatically different, but the larger Phillips screen does enhance the viewing experience.
The sound is fair on both the Phillips and the Axion without headphones, but I don't think that the idea was to use the units without them. Sound is fabulous on the Phillips with a good pair of headphones, and just okay on the Axion; your iPod headphones will do just fine for either unit (and if you don't have a pair you'll need to buy one because the players don't come with any). Both have two audio output jacks, and a 3-way splitter (not included) worked fine on both so that 4 people could watch and listen at the same time with headphones.
Here's the big difference between the two units: Battery Life.
I've gotten almost 7 hours out of the Phillips' battery, and the Axion's battery gives you less than 2 hours. Therefore, if you're an airline traveler or just want to bring your player somewhere that you can't use either the car adapter or the DC adapter, then you absolutely don't want the Axion; you want the Phillips.
On a recent airline trip the Axion--after a full charge--conked out after less than two hours...that's not even a full movie in most cases.
The Phillips' battery is a bit bulky. You'd think that with today's technology they'd be able to slim it down, but you can't complain about the 6+ hours of life you get with it after a full charge. The Axion's battery is smaller and more lightweight than the Phillips, but what can you do other than watch a few SpongeBob episodes with less than two hours of battery life. The Phillips PET824 is good for at least 2 full-length features before charging and that's awesome for long trips where you can't use the DC adapter or car adapter.
The car adapter on both the Axion and the Phillips work great and they both have long cords. So no need for the battery on car trips. The Axion at best might be a nice, less expensive alternative if you won't be taking your portable DVD player to places that require battery use.
Both the Phillips and the Axion fit in my small briefcase, and they're both relatively light. The Axion is a feather compared to the Phillips. Amazon sells cases for the units that can mount on the back of the driver or passenger seats. The case I got also mounts in between the driver and passenger seats. I'd highly recommend a case for your player. I went with the Case Logic Koskin DVD Player Case.
All in all....The Phillips PET824 was a much more satisfying purchase for me. For my purposes, the Axion just won't do for airline trips, and that's a major requirement; hence, the Axion is a major disappointment. But as I said earlier, the Axion is certainly a viable alternative if you don't mind sacrificing screen size and you don't plan on the need for battery power.
Choose your view.


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The Axion AXN6070 portable DVD player has a 7’’ Wide-Screen TFT LCD monitor with hi-resolution and hi-brightness. It features a top-loading DVD/CD/MP3 player with anti-shock and anti-vibration features to avoid skipping and stalling when used in a moving vehicle. It has an audio/video output jack for a camcorder’s input and for supporting external TV/monitor. It comes with a card-style remote control. It comes with small built-in stereo speakers on the front of the monitor, or two people can listen at a time via the dual Hi-Fi stereo headphone output. In addition to the typical volume adjustment, this player also lets you adjust screen brightness.The AXN6070 operates on 9V DC, with AC/DC adapter for indoor use, cigarette lighter adapter for in-car use, or rechargeable battery pack at bottom for portable use. It has a flip up screen, with the viewing angle adjustable up to 180 degrees (vertical). The DVD menu includes up, down, left, right, ok pause, stop, wide, previous, play, and next buttons.

What’s in the box: Axion AXN-6070 portable DVD player, rechargeable battery, AC adapter, cigarette lighter adapter, Remote control, Instruction Manual.

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Epson PowerLite Home Cinema 6100 1080p 3LCD Home Theater Projector Review

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(More customer reviews)If you are looking to break into the 1080p projector territory, this is an excellent projector! I've had the chance to use my 6100 now for a few weeks, and it definitely doesn't disappoint. Image quality is fantastic, and the colors are great too (when configured correctly). I've been using mine with the HDMI output of a Harman Kardon AVR-254 7x50W 7.1-Channel Home Theater Receiver with HDMI 1.3a Repeater.
Pros:
* This sucker is BRIGHT. I am amazed at how nice it looks even with ambient light.
* Minimal screen door, as should be expected for a 1080p projector.
* The expanded color mode is beautiful, and works quite well.
* Contrast ratio is good, but don't believe the 18000:1. It is still remarkably good for a

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Experience home entertainment in a whole new way with the Epson PowerLite Home Cinema 6100. This affordable projector puts you in the middle of the action with blockbuster brightness and contrast. Whether you enjoy movies, games or sporting events, every image is sure to pop off the screen thanks to Epson’s new D7 panel and an impressive 18,000:1 contrast ratio. It’s easy with Epson’s 3LCD, 3-chip optical engine and 1800 lumens of color/ white light output* Best of all, with the Epson exclusive Cinema Filter and OptiCinema lens by Fujinon, you’re sure to experience movies like never before. (*Footnote: Light output varies depending on modes (color and white light output))

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Creative Xdock Review

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(More customer reviews)I purchased this item in Amazon for my iPhone 3GS. It works pretty well with iPhone 3GS even though the item description says it is for iPod.
Cons:
- The video out on Xdock will not work with iPod Touch, iPod Classic, iPod Nano (3rd generation), iPhone.
- Remote and the devise is bulky when compared with Apple Universal Dock
- The audio out (3.5 mm AUX) is present just beside the infrared remote port in the front of the dock. If you are using this audio out, speaker's cable some times block the remote signals and you have to come straight to the infrared port to use remote.
Pros:
- It really enhances the sound quality. I tested my speakers with and without using this dock and i can clearly notice the sound difference.
- Remote works perfectly. It has good range and has all the features you need to control iPod.
- It comes with different docking adapters so you can place your iPod and iPhone on the dock perfectly.
- It has video out, s-video out, audio line in and out, audio optical line out, USB connectors.
- The dock comes with universal charger and adapters, video cable and audio optical cable.
Overall it is a great replacement to Apple Universal Dock which is expensive than this. If you are looking for smaller device to save some space and want video out from iPhone, i recommend you to go for Apple Universal Dock. Take a look at both items if you are planing to buy one.

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Creative Xdock lets you connect to your home theater receiver for DTS surround sound. Xdock features both composite and S-Video outputs so that you can connect to your TV to share your pictures, videos, and shows that are on your iPod. Play, pause and skip through all your music and movies with the wireless remote control. It also lets your restore detail to compressed music like MP3s and iTunes. Xdock is a complete dock, it also charges your iPod while it's docked and even includes a USB port to connect and sync your iPod with iTunes.

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Toshiba SD-3990 Progressive Scan DVD Player Review

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(More customer reviews)First of all, let me say that this unit is very well worth the money. As "just a DVD player" I give it FIVE over FIVE points (or ten/ten if you wish).
The unit comes as Region Free DVD Player. Professionally modified to play any region out of the box. This feature makes it most versatile player as this player can play any region 1,2,3,4,5,6 PAL or NTSC on regular American TV just out of the Box It just works.
Good things:
it can play NTSC and PAL DVD, VCD. and when it plays PAL VCD, it will fit the image so that the image is not out of proper aspect ratio. You can even easily choose the left or right audio channel which is typical of VCD. Further, this DVD player can play DivX, MPG, mp3, jpg. It can play DivX with subtitles. When fast forwarding, it can go up to 30x and 100x (seems like not 100x but maybe 50x). When you step frame by frame, it works flawlessly. It's a great player for the price, considering all the media it plays (ours played DVD+RW too) and the quality of sound and picture it produces.
As a straight DVD player, this player excels. It has an absolutely brilliant progressive picture, with rich colors, and no prog-scan artifacts whatsoever. There are also a couple of nice digital touch-up controls, sharpness and brightness which can come in handy to boost dark images.
As a DIVX/Xvid player, also excellent. Highly compatible with divx 4/5 and vxid, not at all with divx 3.11 or ms mp4 v2 - according to my testing. plays ac3 audio on these files too. Interesting problem with divx subtitles. Very compatible, yet places them in the middle of the screen, which is weird, but oddly workable. The menu system for avi files is intuitive, but only captures the first 16 characters of the filename.
As a dvd-r player, it's also solid. It has played all media I've thrown at it (-r, -rw). The only problem is that it's picky about flaws. In fact, I have dozens of labeled dvd-r's which will break-up and not play past a certain point. unfortunate, but after I removed the labels (not an easy process) they played to the end.
Now for my favorite feature, the coup de grace: auto aspect-ratio. I have a 16:9 set. When I enable this feature (default), anamorphic titles will fill the screen, 4:3 titles will be in the middle (though zoomed in ever-so-slightly) and non-anamorphic letterbox titles will be zoomed in to fill the width of the 16:9. It makes this adjustment for dvd and divx content. And it gets it right 95% of the time - the other 5% you can adjust manually.

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Nicely affordable yet packed full of powerful video and audio playback features, the Toshiba SD-3990 single-disc, progressive scan DVD player has a stylishly silver, super-slim profile that measures just 1.65 inches high. It's also compatible with a wide variety of disc and digital file formats, including DVD-R/RW, CD-R/RW, and VCD discs as well as MP3, WMA, and JPEG (Kodak Picture and FujiColor CDs) content burned to disc. It's also DivX Home Theater Certified, meaning that it's compatible with video burned to disc using both the DivX video format.
The SD-3990 performs 3:2 pulldown detection and reversal, too--a handy feature for watching progressive-scan movie programs in their native 24-frame format. To adapt 24 frames-per-second movies to 30 fps video, frames in the original movie must be duplicated; 3:2 pulldown digitally corrects this duplication by removing the redundant information to display a frame-accurate picture.
With the JPEG Viewer, you can easily display your favorite digital photos and create custom slideshows with a few simple clicks of the player's remote control. The interactive Digital Picture Zoom feature allows you to select an area of the video from a DVD and magnify it. Other DVD playback features include fast scan, slow motion, multi-angle selection, multi-subtitle selection, and parental lock.
You get vivid, realistic sound, thanks to Toshiba's 24-bit/192 kHz pulse code modulation (PCM) audio processor. PCM audio translates digital signals from your DVDs and CDs into warmer, natural sound. The DVD player offers Dolby Digital and DTS decoding, and you can connect to a multi-channel home theater surround sound system via the coaxial digital audio output. It also produces 3D virtual surround sound from two speakers. It features the following video and audio connections:
Composite A/V: 1
S-Video: 1
Component Video: 1
Digital audio: 1 coaxial

Tech Talk DivX is a compressed digital video format (like MP3) that's based on the MPEG-4 video compression standard. It can reduce the video from a DVD (MPEG-2) to around 10 percent of its original size while still retaining good video and audio quality, enabling you to store several two-hour length movies on burned DVD media.
Component video (also called Y/Pb/Pr) features a three-jack video input, which provides separate connections for luminance (Y), blue color difference (PB) and red color difference (PR). This results in increased bandwidth for color information, resulting in a more accurate picture with clearer color reproduction and less bleeding than you would get with S-Video or composite (RCA yellow video plug) connections. You will need a separate RCA left/right audio cable for sound.
What's in the Box Single-disc DVD player, remote control (with batteries), printed operating instructions

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Bose 161 Bookshelf Speaker System (Black) Review

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(More customer reviews)Admittedly I'm a music lover, not a technophile. I'm more interested in Charlie Watts than I am in watts per channel. But my ear is well tuned and I know what sounds good. It would seem that there is some Bose backlash out there; perhaps in response to the Rolls Royce reputation it's carried through the years. I don't know, and frankly I don't care.
I will tell you that I bought my pair not as part of a surround system but as bookshelf speakers for my small home office and I couldn't be happier. They're attractive, have a low profile, and provide total range at all volumes. I tested them in the store with CDs that had lots of challenging highs, sizzling cymbals, that sort of thing. The definition was clear as can be. When you crank them up the sound holds together beautifully, no mud, no distortion. I find that solo piano is another good way to test speaker clarity, I went with The Koln Concert by Keith Jarrett and the results were mesmerizing.
As far as bass response is concerned, good grief, what's the fuss? Even at low volumes I can hear Mingus plucking the strings, when I listen carefully I can even hear him dropping ironic hints. As to the higher register, that's where the clarity of these speakers really shines, Stephanie Mills soars and swoops like an angel.
Then of course there are those irresponsible moments when I simply must blow off a little steam. Out comes the Coltrane, Ayler, Dolphy, Hendrix, Winter, Tower Of Power and up goes the volume. The desk toys start dancing because everything in the room is vibrating. Even then, these unassuming monsters deliver like tomorrow might never come. I've held minority opinions in the past and I'll hold another here, as far as I'm concerned these speakers are fantastic and actually under-priced.

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Enjoy rich, full sound from music or movies with this compact pair of sleek Bose speakers. Whether placed on a desk or bookshelf or mounted on a wall for use as surround speakers, these speakers are designed to deliver balanced, spacious sound with minimal or moderate amplifier power (10 to 100 watts per channel). Automatic protection circuitry keeps the speaker drivers from being overdriven, heightening the speakers' reliability without interfering with your listening.

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Bose Acoustimass 5 - Speaker System, ideal for stereo or home theater use - Black Review

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(More customer reviews)I was having issues myself with sound quality with these speakers until I went to Bose.com and read the user guide. These speakers are meant to produce sound both directly and reflectively. If you have all of the elements pointing forward with no surfaces to bounce off of the experience is not satisfying. You need to tuck the sub away in a corner (to reflect off the walls) and the smaller speakers I find work great with one element pointing directly and the other pointing at a wall (each speaker has 2 elements). The sound with the reflection is much richer and satisfying than when everything's pointed directly at you.

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Experience enhanced sound from Bose's most affordable, next-generation Acoustimass stereo speakers. The Acoustimass 5 system in black delivers bass that's the deepest and fullest yet. Two single-cube speakers--smaller than ever before--are elegantly designed to fit virtually any decor. And the module easily hides away behind furniture or off in a corner, so all the lifelike sound seems to flow from the tiny cubes.

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Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex TV STAJ100 Review

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(More customer reviews)Ok, let's get something straight right away. The biggest thing I was looking forward to with this little device was if and how well it handled ISO files. I have great news, in that it does so very nicely. You basically browse to where the ISO files are located, and just click on the file. It starts playing immediately and at that point functions just like a DVD player. I would even suggest that it's better than a DVD player in that it has a very quick response to commands, such as chapter skips and fast forwarding. Video quality is fantastic. I have this plugged into a Panasonic 42" Plasma at 1080P and the up-conversion is very good.
So, that being said, I'm immediately happy with this device. For me everything else is just a 'nice to have' feature. Let's talk about those nice to haves...
The device is small. It has a door in the front that can open up to insert Seagate's FreeAgent's HDD's. Doing so isn't required to use the device at all. You can just as easily stream music/videos/pictures from a network device. However, on the main screen there are buttons associated with music/videos/pictures, that won't work unless you do have the drive installed and Seagates software sync'ed up with a PC (Win or Mac). At some point, I'll get around to installing that software on my Mac or my PC, but I haven't done so yet.
Plugging in and powering up was a snap. It took less than 30 seconds to power up and I was ready to go. There was no lengthy setup to perform. Literally plug and play. I was immediately able to click on some of the Internet features, such as Youtube and Flickr. Looking at pictures in HD is really amazing. Extremely clear and really a pleasure to look at.
The remote is small, but a bit cheap. This seems to be a common theme among these devices in that there's no real though put into the remote. It's not that complicated, so I feel it's very easy to use once you've learned the button layout. It has the common playback buttons, as well as arrow buttons and a home button. If you're ever lost, click on the home button to get back to the main menu. The one thing I hate is that the IR sensors aren't very forgiving. You have to firmly push on the remote buttons and make sure that you're pointing directly at the GoFlex. There's no feedback, so you essentially have to wait a few seconds to know whether or not it's going to work. I wish there was a LED on the device that blinked when it received a command.
The only other feature that I'm interested in is the NetFlix playback. It works very similar to others in that you can browse your saved queue and select the movie you want to watch. It's work very well. Video quality also is very good and is likely limited to what NetFlix is able to stream. There's seems to be zero strain on the device to playback movies.
The interface is very basic. I would place it significantly below the quality of the Roku box, but better than most other media players (aka PCH or NMT, if you know what I'm talking about) I've tested. There doesn't appear to be any way to modify or customize the interface. There's an options menu that lets you do very common stuff like check the network settings, change video resolution, etc...
Overall, I like the device and successfully met my requirements for ISO files. I hope that future updates improve on the interface as well as add other features. One feature in particular that I would like to see is Amazon OnDemand. I don't use that service that much, but it's nice to have when you want to watch some of the latest releases. That being said, I would have no problem in recommending this as a solid Media Player. It's probably one of the best values out there today.
Pros
====
- Plays ISO files perfectly
- Great up-conversion for movie files
- Excellent video quality (for 42" plasma @1080p via HDMI)
- NetFlix playback works very well
- Interface is pretty quick, even when browsing network devices
- Excellent value
Cons
====
- The remote is a bit on the cheap, but decent button layout.
- Not enough feedback when using the remote. It's hard to tell if the button you clicked is doing anything.
- Requires firm button clicks and direct pointing at the device.
Wishlist
========
- Add Amazon OnDemand
- Improvements to interface, such as better feedback when clicking remote buttons
- Improve the remote IR sensitivity
- Recognize folder bitmap images. Would be very helpful when browsing video folders.

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The Seagate GoFlex TV HD Media Playing Device allows you to view photos, listen to music, and watch your digital movies on your TV.

Get 23% OFF

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