Home > Consumer Reviews > JVC XV-501BK DVD Player

After a power fluctuation, my JVC player would only play G-rated movies, even with the parental controls turned off. Found out that the EEPROM needed to be reset and it solved the problem. I haven't had any problems with it where multi-layers is concerned. In fact this is one of the few machines that I haven't had that problem with. Anyone having problems with their machine should see about resetting the EEPROM. Great player otherwise.

As one of the earlier reviewers has written, the player could not play "Cruel Intentions" additionally my Player would not read "The Mummy" or "Saving Private Ryan". It will read my other DVDs. Question is what should I be looking for on the DVD to determine if my JVC will be able to read it. From the reviews it appears to have problems reading a "double layered" DVD.

Picture and sound quality for sub-$500 players is pretty much splitting hairs. There are lots of goodies on all these players like DTS, Digital Dolby, optical outputs - but for me, these features don't really mean much to my system that consists of a 1984 Sony KV25XBR bolted to my stereo. What I was looking for was reliability, ease-of-use, price, cool features like zoom and some control over picture quality. I compared the Panasonic A110 (rented the machine), and a Toshiba 2109 (friend has one). I also looked at the Pioneer DV414 and DV525 at the store. The Panasonic seems to be a solid bare bones player, the remote was okay, but not great (tiny buttons) - construction seemed flimsy. The Toshiba 2109 was looking like the machine for me, except that I would toss the remote as far as possible and replace it with a universal. My friend with the Toshiba believes that using the remote is giving him carpal tunnel! Enter the JVC XV501BK - the remote is FABULOUS and the joystick is, well, a joy to use. The computer style GUI is a snap to navigate. The 4x ZOOM and PAN is great, and the VFP is neat - you can tweak the sharpness of the playback. The fit-and-finish of the player seemed just a cut above the Panasonic or the Toshiba, and more professional looking as well. And so it went - the JVC won my heart. I don't know if this model is being discountinued, but the store was clearing them out so I purchased this little gem for all of $269. I have now entered DVD heaven...

I have a part-time job in a stereo store, and there are several DVD players running on demos. What I particularly like about the JVC is the quiet operation, just a little "whoosh" when the disk comes up to speed compared with an extremely annoying high-pitch whine other players, notably the SAMSUNG made. I also like the counter showing the total time elapsed, unlike the SONY which shows only the time per chapter. Finally, when I brought it home, another unadvertised feature I really liked versus the SAMSUNG and the PANASONIC which I also tried at home, was that when you put it on pause, it stays on pause until the cows come home, unlike the others which just shut off and good luck trying to find your spot. The screen will go dim, but when you come back from fixing yourself a sandwich, all you have to do is hit "play" again. SONY and PIONEER handle it differently, after so many minutes on pause, it stops the movie, but when you hit play it will resume at the point where you left off. This is annoying though if you want to restart the movie from the beginning, you have to hit "stop" TWICE, then "play". Unlike the gloom-and-doom reviewer, after playing some 50-odd DVD's I have had no problems whatsoever. I have four JVC VCR's, including one ten years old which has seen daily use (until I got the DVD player), all I ever had to fix was the rewind, once, on that one player. I think JVC is a good bet for reliability.

If you are looking for a very nice and good futures DVD player, this could be one of your best choices.