Home > Consumer Reviews > Harman Kardon DVD5 5-Disc DVD Player

The Harman Kardon 800 customer service line has a wait, well, I can't count that high, and I received no email reply back with the info I need to make an informed purchase, but I went and bought the DVD5 anyway, and right out of the box, it is defective. The carousel tray opens and closes all on it's own, over and over again, it just keeps on doing it, and skipping to the next track on the disk, and the only way to stop this is to turn the deck off, not with the remote control, as the deck will turn itself on again and the carousel door will just strat to open and close by itself, again, and again, and again, and again, so you must turn it off with the power switch on the deck. Harman Kardon, you disappointed an almost life long loyal customer on this one, and on you poor, I mean, lack of customer service, on the phone and via email.

I won this DVD player off of a sweepstakes and the day it was sent to me, it worked great... for 5 minutes. It began having troubles reading discs and would continously try to read them unsuccessfully. The tray then jammed and would not open, holding hostage 5 of my best DVDs. I brought it in for repair under warranty, and they couldn't even diagnose and fix the problem and said that they found it worked great. It worked when I brought it home, this time for about an hour. I am in the process of sending it back for repair.

I've owned this player for about two years and at first I loved it but just recently I started having problems with it. Long story short the power supply died and I'm not going to pay to ship it across the U.S. to C.A. to the only certified repair shop in North America. I had DVD's stuck inside so I just removed the 7 or so screws and removed the cover. I was able to remove my DVD's and I then proceeded to smash the insides with my foot out of pure frustration. As seen in the movie Office Space :) DO NOT PURCHASE THIS ITEM!!!

Or maybe I'm just cursed with the DVD5. I'll be on my fifth one now. The extended warranty was the best part of the purchase. Harmon has some great stuff and I own 2 AVRs and thought I would get the same bulletproof reliability by spending the extra money for their DVD player. They know audio, but they have a lot of improvements to make on this unit. The first one would just freeze up in the middle of a movie or even while in the menu of the DVD. This required have to completley shut the player off and turn it back on (is the DVD5 running windows?:) The second one I was given didn't even work out of the box. It wouldn't even turn on. The power light would come on, but that's it! The one after that sounded like a blender grinding ice when it spun at the higher speeds for DVDs and wouldn't even play the DVD (It did play CDs though, again good audio:) Now the fourth one I thought was going to see me through, but now it too is not turning on also. Again, the power light is there, but no response from the front controls, remote etc... Maybe the lemon law covers this. If this one is unrepairable, I'm going with another brand and paying at least 60% less. Seriously, don't buy this unit even if you are drooling for it like I was.

I bought this machine with the highest of hopes. It worked well, not great for two months. Then it stopped working. There is only one place in the US that is qualified by Harmon Kardon to repair it. They are in California and not cheap. After repair costs and shipping I could have bought another DVD player. I bought my Mother a [less expensive] DVD player for X-mas. It had equal quality and more features. Plus if it breaks after two months I'm only out [$$].