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

I purchased this player a year ago. I am on my 4th one, having returned the first to due to the fact that it was completely broken and would not play at all, and the other 3 for the same problem described below.

This player does work, but the problem is, it doesn't play all DVD's. It will freeze up and take 20 minutes to move 2 frames. The DVD's that I am using are in excellent condition as I am a fanatic when it comes to them. I have had this issue on brand new DVD's as well as older ones.

I do not see the scratches that other owners have complained about, and when I take the DVD's out and use them on other machines they play fine.

I am very disappointed with the quality of Sony at this stage of the game. I'm not looking to do anything special with my DVD player, I am simply looking for what should be a basic function of a player, TO PLAY DVD's.

The "most useful" negative review is based upon the user's lack of knowledge of the unit, as is freely admitted, again and again.

A further example: Set the player (menu option) to NOT play a DVD when the unit is turned on. We simply go to the index to choose our movie.

We have had this unit for about two years, using a keyboard to enter new titles and other information, for those disks that it doesn't read when played. Initially, we did this as a family activity, in small 'bites'. With a large library of DVDs, we have two changers and love having the entire library available, more quickly and on screen, than to dig through a drawer or other manually-sorted retrieval system. While the 995 is slow compared to having everything on flash memory, I simply recall the time it would take for alternative, real world storage/retrieval of disks. We typically pick from the alphabetically arragned movie titles, via page up/down buttons on the remote, or line by line. This is so much more user-friendly than referring to a printout, typing in some disk number, etc.

The sound though our kick-butt home theater system is excellent and the PQ is also; my big plasma showing 1080i through the HDMI cable. The Sony, like other players, is intolerant of many bootleg DVDs, but plays my backup copies just fine.

Using a laptop-programmable Universal Remote Control (URC-850), now all our movies are available with one-button ease, either through the simple TV or with full surround. That puts them in a place that allows us to enjoy this family activity more often, unlike the pre-Sony changer era. These are about the only 400 disk changer available.

One day perhaps, similar quality PQ with quicker play, will be a choice, but now the best choice we found was the Sony changer for the reasons elucidated above.

Adding DVDs is a pain. Although I've had this player for close to a year, I only have twenty or so DVDs loaded in it because it is such a pain in the ass to enter all the information without having a key board. I does have the capacity to read info off the disk but so far I've not had much luck in having DVDs that it is able to read.
Make sure that you place this player where it is going to stay cause you have to remove all disks if you need to move it at a later date.
Picture quality and sound are good. Don't know if you can run the signal through a BluRay player and get better picture/sound.

I have always been a fan of Sony products and admit that most of my components are Sony. When I first bought this unit about 2 years ago I was shocked at the negative reviews posted here. Surely Sony didn't make such an inferior product. I was wrong. Yes, the audio and Picture quality are very good. Yes, it is convenient to store all of your DVDs in one unit to supposedly have access to them at "the touch of a button." I was able to load all of my DVDs with ease and the title search function ID'd about 90% of my disks which was fine (although it did take several hours). Here is my issue with the DVPCX995V: The more I used this player the less it worked correctly. Disks that I have watched before suddenly don't work anymore or the player can't read them. These are not bootlegs or copied disks but store-bought. These disks have not been removed to become scratched or dirty. When I remove them to see if they are damaged, they're not. The player simply will not read them. Not only does the player no longer read most of my disk, it will "get stuck" and simply grunt and moan as it tries to decide what its supposed to do. You can't turn it off or change disks. You simply have to wait for it to finish whatever it is trying to do and then either remove the disk or choose another one and hope it will work. This is extremely frustrating especially when you have guests and we're trying to watch a movie. I've actually bought a $49 DVD player that sits next to my nice sony DVPCX995V to play the DVD that the Sony won't. Yes, I am currently researching other alternatives and I strongly suggest that you avoid this unit . . .

The promise of having all your DVD ready for playback is really appealing to me. Well with this machine this only works if you have a separate printed directory with the DVDs in the machine and the slot number they are in.

I bought a refurbished unit. This machine is supposed to recognize the titles of the DVD's, and for the ones it cannot recognize you can plug in a standard Keyboard and type the titles yourself. Well out of 200+ titles in my library it only recognized about 10, so I had to type the names of the rest... not a big deal since you can use a normal keyboard. For 200+ DVD it took me about 3 hours.

After about a month, out of the blue all the typed names were erased. After a search on the internet I found that this is a somewhat common issue. I called Sony and had the unit replaced (by another refurbished unit, ofcourse).

I got the new (refurbished) unit and went ahead and typed all my DVD titles again, and well... after a few weeks everything was erased again.

I gave up and will trash the unit as soon as I find a replacement with similar features.

By the way, Sony customer/technical support is really really bad. I concur with the other posters here saying that each time you call them, you have to explain the whole thing again.