The Philips PET724 is a Great Portable DVD for the Car or Home

I'm not sure as a kid how I managed on long family trips with only an am/fm radio in the car. But then my two brothers and I rarely fought in the car whereas my kids can't be together for 10 minutes in the car without an argument breaking out. Even trying to play car type games doesn't seem to go well. I found that having a portable DVD player in the car for long trips sure does help make our trips more bearable. There is definitely less fighting. When the DVD player is not in the car on family trips it stays beside my bed. My wife doesn't like the action and thriller movies that I like so I have to watch them at night with headphones after she's asleep.

The DVD player gets a lot of use and recently the inexpensive Mintek which I bought at COSTCO a few years ago finally died. I desperately needed a new one. Thank goodness for after-Thanksgiving sales at Circuit City. I purchased the Philips portable DVD player model PET724 for $89.99. This is a good deal for this player. This is a 7" screen with a beautiful bright and (for the price) sharp screen. The battery lasts up to 4 hours and there are two headphone jacks which is a definite plus for our family. The box includes a car charger, AC power cord, AV cables, and remote control.

Multi-use player!

This CD player will also play video CD, audio CD, MP3, and WMA CD. Use the AV-Out jack to hook this up to your TV to show CD's with JPEG (picture) files.

Other features

For 90 bucks this little unit has some decent features. There are several different slow motion and fast forward settings. There's also a zoom feature that allows you to enlarge the video and to pan. Depending on the disks the player will allow you to change camera angles. There's also a parental lock with security code to prevent your kids from watching movies with ratings you don't approve of.

What's not to like?

Well, there's always some things not to like. For instance, the volume at full blast just isn't that loud and this is really disappointing. It's almost as if you can't fully use this without headphones or hooking up to a TV. The lid doesn't open all the way up so it's a bit of a pain-in-the-neck to get the disks in. The instructions are in English, French and Spanish and printed one very giant piece of paper. It's difficult to navigate through this giant piece of paper trying to read the features and how to use the machine. The player only weighs slightly less than 2 pounds but it's bulky with the battery. Most of the features have to be accessed through the remote control and the writing on the buttons on the remote is nearly impossible to read. Finally, the on/off button on the machine is right next to the button to open the disk lid so sometimes I've pushed the wrong buttons. They are on the side of the player so not easy to distinguish.

The Bottom Line

Overall, this is an excellent DVD player for the price. I think there's a lot of features that you generally don't see on the less expensive players. Durability remains to be seen on this machine but I do recommend it.