Cheap Yamakawa CH-DVD 300S (Electronics) Price

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Customer Reviews of Yamakawa CH-DVD 300S

One of my all-time favorite DVD players
This is a sweet little DVD player. I would love it even were it not for its special capabilities. It has a nice, lightweight remote with well-designed functionality (not the most superior layout, but better than most), a setup menu I found easy to use; and it feels well-built and looks very nice (the latter two being bonuses I did not expect). The player lets you select not only PCM or AC-3, but also provides an equalizer with some degree of customization.

The picture quality is beautiful, and the player seamlessly does everything I have demanded. Be advised that US consumers need to concern themselves with two issues. First, the all-important region. Some DVDs are made without a designated region; these are called "Region 0" and their "region" is allowed in any player. Some DVDs are made with different regions in mind (US is Region 1); and there have been two different methods used by the studios to implement this. One method allows a DVD player to query the disc for the proper region and can allow play; the other method deliberately foils this. For discs encoded with the second method, a player must first be told it is Region X (where X is the proper region). This is not the fault of the player, but the studios (who, frustratingly, often don't ever release highly-sought-after titles in other countries but STILL disable the discs there).

The second issue with which we in the US must be familiar, is that there are other "standards" than ours here. We use the "NTSC" standard to encode our DVDs and videos. The UK, for example, uses the "PAL" standard. If I wanted to watch, say, a DVD of "Solo" from the UK, I would need to ensure I had a player which could play Region 2 DVDs AND which could convert the signal from PAL to NTSC. Many of the more well-known-brand players I found require you to get a PAL TV. This little Yamakawa does not. All you have to do is politely request that he always play NTSC, rather than leave the player on the default "AUTO" setting (NOTE: If you see a black and white wavy picture without sound, you are probably accidentally playing PAL). In summary, this player has been a joy to me and has worked flawlessly; and I hope it can provide others with the kind of happiness it has given me.

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Very cool bit of kit
If you are looking for a DVD player to play not only region 1 DVDs (US) but also region 2 (i.e. UK) DVDs in PAL format, this is your man. If you have a TV that only supports US coding (NSTC) this box will read region 2 PAL disks and play 'em on a NSTC TV, cool hu !
Other multi-region DVD players can't do this (as they require you to have a TV that can receive both PAL and NSTC) and the player costs 3 times the price of this beauty ! OK, I'm off to watch series three of The West Wing which was available in the UK about a month ago, well ahead of the US release of season 2.

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Great multi-region player!!
In my case I was looking for a DVD player to play Region 2 DVD's on an NTSC TV here in the States. I was surprised when I searched for a multi-region player and this one popped up for $60.00, I figured I couldn't go wrong! Even if the worst thing happened, the player didn't work as I expected and I couldn't get a full refund, it's not like I'm spending hundreds of dollars on a player - so it seemed like a good chance to take.

I was pleasantly surprised when I unpacked this player and hooked it up to my system. The first thing I did was turn it on and put in a disc, just to see if it worked out of the box. It did! The picture looked good - the sound was good!

At this point I went into the set-up menu (what strange colors to use). I set most of the settings to my preferences. I got to the equalizer settings, and although you can adjust them, the treble and bass boost caused the sound to distort. I generally leave the processing to my pre-amp processor, so leaving these off was the best solution for me. I was surprised at all the options available for the price of this player.

Another slight negative, this time about the remote - you have to point the remote directly at the player. If you are off by a little the remote won't work. I thought my remote was faulty until I discovered this.

It performed as expected when playing a region 2 DVD that I had purchased (on my NTSC TV). It does everything that I bought it for!!

This player is an excellent value at $60.00!! If you are looking for a decent multi-region player, without spending a lot of cash, this player is for you!!!

One last note - I received the product very quickly - within 5 business days!