Home > Consumer Reviews > Philips HTS3357 - 5.1 ch Tallboy Multi-Region Capable - DVD Home Cinema System - With 1080i Upscaling - Black

Bought this on the Monday and arrived on the Thursday with Amazons SuperSaver Delivery. Brilliant.

The Unit - The DVD player is good. Plays all the dvds I have chucked at it so far, however I have not done the multi-region bit. DVD player is quite. Plays MP3s well with showing the folder structure. What really did impress me was the Direct USB. I managed to play my photos, musics and also Div X's with ease!.

The Speakers - The speakers look pleasent and are not too overpowering. The sound quality is good with no hiss. The only downfall is that the wires are hard wired so enusre you don't intend to put the rear speakers too far. I think they are about 5 meters anyway. The Woofer is good it deep enough for me. The tall boys look nice and the centre speaker is a decent size. I have connected to my Philips tele and the tele remote also works well with the DVD player.

All in all if you after a home cinema and you dont wanna blow your budget this is a great system. Very pleased.

I got this from amazon about 6 months ago (6/2008), it arrived in good time and in good condition. The box is very large (1300 by 1000 by 600)
It is still working well, I would highly recommend this product for all ages, the olds (50's) have found the controls simple to use. The product is well made and has good sound, the issues about buzzing people mentioned i did not come across.
The only things i would change are: 1. the disc try is flimsy like a LG 2. The rear speakers are to large and the base stops you being able to push them against the wall 3. Loading a data stick is a bit fiddly on the controls as you have to hold down the AV button. 4. the data stick can be slow to load, i would not recommend using any larger than 2GB.
Overall a very good product from Philips.

I will start this review by saying that this system is excellent value for money and very easy to setup.

I purchased this system the other day due to many factors , HDMI 1080i HD Video upscaling which is incredible quality especially playing *avi files through the USB Media Player , I dont think I could tell the difference between my Blue Ray PS3 Video to the HDMI 1080i upscaling feature. Please note that this device does not come with a HDMI Cable so you will need to purchase one, it does come with a Scart Cable though.

The two rear speakers are about 1.5 Meters tall with quite a large base , if you are looking to hide these behind furniture you might have a problem. The cable lengh on the rear speakers is about 10m , The L&R speakers have about 5m in lengh and the centre speaker is about the same. The speakers are hard wired so it it not possible to use the longer cable with a different speaker , if you need to use the rear speakers as the front speakers just simply switch the connections as a few people have suggested on these reviews.

The DTS / Surround sound is very high quality , after setting the system up which took about 15 minutes I gave " Black Hawk Down " a play and it felt like bullets were being fired through the window , I would be afraid for the windows to take this system upto full volume.

I will agree that the DVD tray is very delicate , There must be a reason Philips make them like this maybe its cost but in principle this isn't something you should be worried about.

If you have a HDD Media Player you will usually feed the connections directly into your TV , I would suggest that you use a USB / DISC option and USB Cable and use the Philips menu to play your files using the HDMI Output and not your Media Player Menu. For some reason the USB device displays a short file name , example Batman Returns would display BTMANR~1 not a major problem and I can see why Phillips have done this as not all filenames are simple text.

I was expecting to hear a small hiss when the system is on standby , but I can confirm that there is nothing , if you do have issues I have noticed Philips have a the latest firmware on there website but ill doubt you will need that.

This system is absolutely amazing.An upscaling multi region dvd player coupled with a surround sound system that is just incredible for the price.I'd been thinking about buying something like an Onkyo av receiver and a seperate set of surround speakers from Richer Sounds for around the £250 - £350 mark to go with our recently purchased (from amazon) Toshiba 47Z3030db lcd tv and then sometime later replace our Panasonic dvd recorder with a blue-ray player.Then I saw the reviews for this and thought at £115.14 delivered it was worth taking a chance.

Our lounge is 20' by 10',so long and thin,and even though we watch tv from about 13' away,because of how cheap this is, I was still worried that the speakers wouldn't be loud enough or have enough bass.And then we watched the first half of Cloverfield and had to switch it off because I had done all the volume settings too high,particularly the sub-woofer,and we both found it overpowering.The volume and clarity is incredible,and would easily fill a room half as big again.So far we haven't watched anything with the volume much above 15 and that has been more than enough.I agree with another reviewer that the centre speaker is sometimes a tad thin,but it really isn't very much and the sound is absolutely crystal clear.The sub-woofer literally does shake the room,and we have concrete floors,and the satellite speakers are great.

The upscaling picture is noticably better and because of that we won't be buying a blue-ray player until this system breaks down.As far as the few complaints others have made; we have no speaker hiss, so far,and don't need an optical socket,but I agree that the remote is worryingly cheap with very small buttons that are badly laid out and feel as if they could easily stick or stop working.The multi-region hack worked fine and it's had no problem with any region 1 dvds.Changing the speaker volume settings is a pain,but not exactly the end of the world,but other than that I really can't think of much bad to say about this.

As far as sound and picture go this has given us a standard of both that I genuinely thought would cost 4 times as much.If you're planning on spending anything up to £500 to upgrade your tv then listen to this first,or just take the word of all the positive reviews and buy it, because I can't believe you'll get anything better for yor money.

this unit is amazing quality for the price, costing little more than a reasonable dvd player. Useful range of functions. Very good as a basic system