Home > Consumer Reviews > Sony DVPCX995V 400-Disc DVD Mega Changer/Player

Its pretty much been well reviewed here. Just to reiterate some points and clarify a few others. First off, this player DOES play DVD-R disks, I know, I have done so! Plays just fine if you know how to properly burn a disk, DVD-R can play ;-)

Fair WARNING you may think you have enough room in your entertainment center, think again. I thought I had enough room with my behemoth of an entertainment center. But you are not aware of an additional extention on the rear panel that sticks out alot (this houses the actual disk player). Do yourself a favor and double check the measurments. I nearly was forced to either remove the cabinet doors or chop out the back panel of the entertainment panel (so hate doing that) or even return the unit. I got very lucky and it just barely fits.

OK, other than those points, the player function itself resides with being just a giant DVD/CD storage unit. Depending upon how you look at it, it is either a very simple player or a very complicated player. Noting is intuitive about this player! It is relatively quiet. It is slow. It is annoying to get hanged up with those FBI warning screens, the player does, as mentioned before, upon power on autoplay the first disk, nothing you can do to stop it, and your forced to watch the FBI warning unless you proactively remember to do as stated to try and avoid this happening (at the end of a movie hit stop once so next time you can power on and just go to any of the menu sytems).

God help me if I have to move it. I am not going to even try to with out first removing the disks inside as recommended. Just looking at it I believe others comments about the likelyhood of things getting jammed. But that means having to fully remove all the disks and then you guessed it, having to reinput ALL the data if disks are not keep in there specific order.

This is by no means a solution. I purchased from Amazon for $279 with free ground shipping (not to mention additional $30 off, net price of $249 how can I pass that up). It was here in record breaking time 2 days! If it was not for the price, I do not think I would have taken this challenge. Overall, I am OK with it. It does "clean" up my living space. Thats basicly all that it has going for it which is its main selling point.

EDIT-

I just scanned reviews for the previous model 985V, and an alarming situation has been brought to my attention, it seems that there is a possibility for disk damage! You can read all about it on the other product page. This in all suggests inorder to safeguard and ironicly better the disk info and autoplay bug/glitch, that you copy your disks first, in addition strip the FBI warning out, and preinput all the disk info. And then the system will operate much more smoothly. Caution in regards to the possible disk scratching issue, check your disks weekly, randomly, while still within the return period!

EDIT-

DISCOVERED A WORK AROUND TO KILL THE FBI WARNING SCREENS IT APPEARS THAT IF YOU USE THE FAST FOWARD, CHAPTER SKIP BUTTONS I.E. "NEXT", YOU GET TO JUMP PAST THE WAIT AND THEN CAN QUICKLY EXIT OUT. THIS WORKS ON MAJORITY OF WARNING SCREENS, THERE WAS A VERY FEW THAT IT DID NOT WORK FOR. Someone mentioned about CNET review saying use of the FOLDER button is also a work around but I have found that that does not work. After a week, getting a little more comfortable, but am still very weary about the disk scratching issues, still doing random checks before return period expires.

We recently purchased 2 of these units as we have over 500 DVDs. As you can imagine this took us almost 3 days to load. We noticed at first that when we would power up the #1 slot in both machines would be blank. We'd put the info back in and it would come up blank again next time. Yesterday we powered up one of the machines and it hung up in folder loading mode. When we finally got it turned off and powered back up again (which took hitting the power button on the machine itself) we were missing the first 7 titles. My husband tried talking to Sony today and they're saying they've never heard of this problem. Ironic because we heard the same thing that other reviewers are saying from them, that we would have to send the unit to Texas. Thinking of unloading all of those DVD's again, putting them back in the boxes and reloading all of them horrifies me. I would like to know if there are any reviewers out there that have actually sent the unit in, had it fixed and got it back with no flaws! I also wonder if it might just be a certain batch of these units that have this problem, however, I do not want somebody else's problem, i.e. refurbished unit in place of my new one in the event that Sony would even consider changing it out for me. I am very upset and disappointed about this whole thing. Now I am just waiting for the day that the whole menu disappears like so many others on here have had happen. Sony, you used to be great. What happened to you?

With all the complaints about ALL the previous versions of the Sony DVD Changers regarding usability, I was hoping Sony would get it right this time. The Disc Explorer is only slightly improved. For example, the title is no longer limited to 16 or so characters. However, when Auto Start is turned off, you still have to wait for the player to go grab the previously viewed DVD. Arrgh. This has been a complaint for so long it almost appears Sony just doesn't care. Also, there is no facility to access a DVD by number. I don't want to scroll through 300+ titles to get to the one I know is in slot 366.

Video and Audio quality are very good. Since that is not the purpose of this beast, I didn't consider those aspects in the rating. After all, I can get those features for much less money.

unit is very delicate, I just moved it over and all my DVD's unseated causing the player to jam. I had to remove all 312 DVD's to remove the one that jammed!!!! I mean I just pushed the unit over slightly!

If you don't believe me, do yourself a favor and do some research on the web about others who have gotten their valuable DVDs destroyed by this DVD changer.

I bought two units. They both worked fine for the first year, then one of them started marking up each DVD that it tried playing, and displaying the "Cannot Play" message for each.

That's not all -- if it isn't able to play a DVD, this changer is programmed to automatically load the next DVD. If it is one of the "bad" ones that has the "problem" of destroying DVDs, and if you're not paying attention it will dutifully mark up each and every DVD in your changer, rendering all of your DVDs unplayable.

It's a good thing I was paying attention, and had read some of the other user reviews that mentioned this problem. I stopped it after 4 or so DVDs, so only 4 of my DVDs are toast. I tried playing them in several different DVD players...they're toast. I looked at them and each one has a deep half-inch scratch in the same spot, and I know for certain that they were spotless before.

For the first year I thought I had gotten lucky or that this only happened with maybe 3% of Sony's DVD changers. Now it seems more like 50% to me. And I am closely watching the second unit that is still working.

Sony should have issued a recall on these. DO NOT BUY THIS UNIT!