Sony DVP-NS57P/B Progressive Scan DVD Player, Black
See it at Amazon.com for $35.00Average Customer Rating
(4.0 out of 5)
Amazon Customer Reviews
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(5 out of 5)Awesome DVD player for the price
I've had this DVD player a few weeks now and have watched a couple dozen DVDs. None have given me any problems, including scratched DVDs and DVDs burnt on cheap media which would freeze and skip on my old econo DVD player.
The pros: The user interface is excellent. It seems solid, quick to respond, and well made. I love the speed up/slow down feature, very cool. It's sleek and compact looking, excellent remote control response range.
The cons: The remote will not program for too many TVs, there's only about a dozen codes and none of them work for my older TV. I'm sure it's fine if you're TV is from the last 5 years or so, or a very common older one though.
This model is one of very few DVD players I looked at that wasn't made in China, definitely a plus in my book (although many other Sonys are).
I can't yet speak for long-term use, but overall, I'm very impressed.
(5 out of 5)Good choice, great value for the price.
NOTE: This review is a copy&paste of my review for the 2005 SKU/model/version of this player ... Sony DVPNS50P. After that it became the "55" model before this year when it became the "57" model.
DECEMBER 2005: I have only had this item for about three weeks or so. I am hoping that it "holds up" over time, unlike a lot of other DVD players on the market that apparently fail so quickly they are practically disposable in nature.
The "pros" on this item (so far) are:
* sleek, slim, uncluttered look of the unit
* comes in either black or silver, so you can match it up to your other devices.
* easy set up. There's a electrical plug, trip-RCA jacks and an S-video jack. Hook-up is a snap. Hardware-wise, the device, then, is really uncluttered.
* seems to be a good deal for the price.
The "cons" (so far) are:
* as said elsewhere by other reviewers... it IS slow. Slow to boot a disc. Slow to re-start a disc that has been stopped. Just slow.
* the display readout on the front of the box. It scrolls words like "welcome," "open" "close" and "no text." The firmware engineer was apparently out to lunch on this one. There's not even a clock display. It will display the time the DVD has played, thank goodness.
*the on-screen menu is pretty lame. Must have been the same engineer. The menu choices are only displayed as cryptic graphics, and the choices for each graphic are brief and uninformative (as in "on, off, auto" or similar types of statements). You will absolutely have to work through the manual to figure it out. And you won't find a lot of useful functionality after you do. It is a pretty bare-bones box.
* The remote control could use a good bit of improvement. The text is large enough to read ... but the buttons barely protrude from the face. You have to grasp this thing firmly, get your finger right on the button and apply a good bit of pressure to score. And a lot of the buttons can't be pushed while the thing is sitting on the coffee table ... the back of the device is beveled at the top, so if you press on the buttons near the top -- common usage buttons like TV on/off, box on/off and open/close -- while it is sitting on a level surface, the thing just flips up in the air. And the range is horrid. It can't handle getting its signal over the edge of my coffee table three feet away from the box. You've got to pick it up and aim it directly at the device if you want the box to respond. There's no facilitation for using the remote at night (no glow in the dark, backlighting, light-through, etc.) AND the remote came in silver. Who at Sony thought that I would want a silver remote if I bought a black box? Was molding cases for the remote in two different colors too big a challenge for them ... or did it just make it easier for Sony to manage its inventory?
* The box has already told me "no disc" incorrectly a couple of times. Jogging it opened and closed resolved the issue. Either the tray is not designed to align the disc 100% when inserted ... or this is an indication the device is going to have read problems down the road. Time will tell.
Still, IF it is quality, IF it is durable, then it's worth what I paid for it.
UPDATE: September, 2006. After owning one for almost a year ... and buying two more this summer ... I can still recommend this unit. Every once in a great while, it gets confused enough so that I have to unplug it from the wall to "reboot it." It has tracked flawlessly on almost every DVD ... just a freeze here and there on some heavily used Netflix rentals. I do not see any evidence of dual-layer freezing.
UPDATE December, 2007. All three units still working fine and still recommended.
NOTE: The "57" does NOT have S-video input; the "50" does. I replaced the remotes with a Sony RM-VL600 'trainable' remote. $20 and well worth it. Check it out.
(1 out of 5)Never Worked
I just bought one of these, brought it home, hooked it up and tried any number of clean DVDs that work fine on other players. None of them worked. The display said either "NO DISK" or "CANNOT PLAY".
Maybe some of these work great, but their quality control must not be very strict or this one never would have left the factory.
I selected a Sony because I expected a high standard of quality. Why spend the extra $30 for a name brand if it's just as likely a waste of an afternoon as some generic crap from Daewoo or Apex?
(5 out of 5)Great Value for a Great Price
My old Sony DVD player, which was the same model started getting some problems after 7 years of performing an excellent duty. I decided to by the same model again and was amazed that the price dropped significantly. I paid less than half what I paid the last time. DVD players got cheaper, but not that much cheaper.
Compared to some other DVD players that are around the same price and which I know personally from own experience or from experiences by friends of mine, does the Sony provide a much better quality in picture and sound than those.
You can certainly buy a more "fancy" DVD player with a lot more gimmicks for a much higher price, but if what you do is just playing back your DVD movies, from the original disc or DVD-R/DVD+R backup (single and dual layer), this Sony will do just fine. It does not have the ability to play back MP3 Cd's, but I honestly never used such feature, even when I had it with a different DVD player.
(5 out of 5)Highly recommend!
I visited an electronics store recently and brought a few DVDs (both -R and +R) that I made on my PC. We hooked up 3 players selling for about the same price. The Philips player kept stalling and pausing and then stopped completely after a few minutes. The Toshiba SD-4000 was the same, couldn't play my homemade DVDs. I got a little worried.
Finally, the Sony DVP-NS57P worked perfectly, no problem at all! I'm very, very happy and can now play any of my DVDs. It's definitely the best for me and for anyone not concerned with features most people don't use.
So, I've saved you a lot of hassle of testing machines. Get this one.