Home > Consumer Reviews > Philips DVDQ50 Slimline Design Progressive Scan DVD Player

I just hooked this puppy up to my Sony KV-34 XBR800 1080i tude HDTV using progressive component.

Wow.

It's very hard to tell that this is not a 1080i input. I mean this thing is crisp!

Why pay the 2x the cost of say a Sony 715? That's easy: Farouda (sic?) line doubling is -way- better than Sony, and I'm a big fan of Sony.

However after spending an afternoon of plugging every DVD player that "Good Guys" had (~20) into the -same- TV, it was easy to see that the Phillips was the best.

An easy way to make the conclusion that Phillips is better: Phillips is the only manufacturer that goes to the trouble of making a -technical- demo DVD to show why their picture is best. I used it in Sony, JVC, Technics, Panasonic, etc. Makes it very easy to see what you are getting...

Like all the other retail stores, they plug the good DVD players into good TV's and lame ones into lame TV's and then try to trick you into spending as much as you can. Often they even have the same model of TV adjusted for lame color, etc. DO yourself a big favor and make sure they plug the DVD players into the same set...

It really is much better than the cheaper units in the pack of ... products, and even better IMHO than almost all of the >... players. Time for Sony to get a clue...

-jj

The picture quality is good except during fast panning even in progressive scan. A fast pan creates a slight stutter in the image which some may not notice but its there. A much worse problem is the DVD drives well know "glitches" when playing dual layered DVDs. Layer changes are slow skip frames. The worse problem is that the drive will occasionally just stutter during a DVD when there is no layer change at all. These problems are known by the tech savvy on the web (just do a search) and plague many of the Q50 in US and abroad. I returned my first one and got a replacement. It was better but not 100%. I then found a firmware upgrade which also seemed to help a bit. The bottom line is that this drive is not worth the hassles at any price.

I have owned this player for 3 months now. The picture and sound quality are excellent. However, my player does skip frames very slowly during layer changes, and sometimes does this just ramdomly as well.
It's an unfortunate problem, but at least it's a very good player other than that.