Home > Consumer Reviews > Magnavox MPD820 8-Inch Portable DVD Player

The dvd player worked well for 1 hour. Then the picture failed totally. This is when the pain began. It took over a week to get a customer number to enable me to return the item Promised call backs never happened. Then I returned it and it has been more than 8 weeks. Last story was this model is no longer made and they are trying to decide what to replace it with. Again a promised call back never occured. The item still has not been replaced! I would stay away from magnavox / phillips at all costs.

If I had to name our best gift of 2006, I would have to say the portable DVD player. Our children take it everywhere. Our daughter even sets it up in the bathroom while she takes a bath! It works indoors, outdoors and in the car! This was a great buy!

I've had this for about 5 months and have been really happy with it. The image quality on the screen is better than most other portable dvd players in this price range. I love the aspect ratio of 16:9 since I tend to watch movies in widescreen mode. The battery life is pretty good, better than I expected actually. The case is sturdy and it's taken it's share of bumps.

The biggest con that I can come up with, and they lose a star for this, is that a number of useful features can only be accessed via the remote control. If you're on a plane you can't use a remote. And it seems silly to use a remote for a device that is literally right in front of you. Also, some sort of sadist designed it. My eyes are pretty good, but I have a hard time reading tiny white text on top of light grey. Anyone would. What were they thinking?

I bought this portable dvd player for plane trips for our little ones. It worked fine for two trips (over a span of 6 months). However, in preparation for our upcoming vacation, I took the player out of its case and it failed to operate. I always felt that the flimsy on/off switch on the side looked like it could brake, and I guess it did. The battery light is on, indicating it has power, but the thing just won't spin the disk. What a waste.

I don't see in the specs that it will play DVD+R and DVD+RW. Happily it plays the DVD+R's that I have burned. I did find that the volume on my DVD's was a bit low, but Radio Shack had a good small amplifier to plug into the phone outlet and earphones with adjustable volume which solved the problem. Regarding JPEG's, it does indeed display them from a CD and automatically start a slideshow if there are multiple photos. I am very impressed.