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Review: Mintek portable DVD player

Mintek portable DVD players are made in China, and sold cheap at place like Target. I bought mine at Hecht’s (a department store in the Washington, DC area) for $179.

The model I bought, the MDP-1750, has a 7” LCD screen. I wouldn’t exactly call the screen state of the art, but it’s surprisingly viewable. The LCD has excellent resolution, but where it comes up short is in dynamic range and color saturation. The screen is also very sensitive to the viewing angle, which is a sign of an inferior LCD. Nevertheless, I’d have to say the quality of the LCD screen is this unit’s best feature.

The MDP-1750 has built in stereo speakers. The sound quality from them is pretty bad, but I don’t consider this a negative because it’s impossible to get good sound quality from such small speakers, and most people will be using headphones when using this unit. The sound through headphones is excellent. Headphones are not included in the box, but any set of headphones for a portable stereo will do just fine.

The MDP-1750 comes with a snap-on lithium ion battery that’s supposed to give three hours of battery life. This claim remains to be tested, but one hopes that the battery will last at least long enough to watch a two hour movie.

The MDP-1750 comes with a cable to hook the player up to a TV set. There’s no S-video or composite video output, just a basic RF output plus a left and right audio channel.

The MPD-1750 comes with a little remote control. This sounds like a cool feature, but why do you need a remote control for a personal unit that’s going to be right in front of you? Well, the way the Mintek is designed, most of the unit’s functions are unavailable without the remote control! I find this feature to be a big negative. I don’t want to have to carry a remote control around with me in order to be able to scan forwards and backwards, but that’s what the designers at Mintek expect you to do.

Another annoyance is that the MDP-1750 doesn’t remember where you were watching a DVD after you turn it off. I imagine this would be especially annoying when traveling. Suppose you are in an airport terminal watching a DVD, and then your plane starts boarding. So you turn off your DVD player, board the plane, and forty-five minutes later when the pilot says you can now use electronic gadgets, you turn it back on. You now have to figure out where you left off. And if you left your remote control home, you can’t even fast forward or rewind! You can just scroll backwards and forwards by scene.

Overall, the Mintek MDP-1750 is a usable gadget with decent picture quality, but severely lacking in user friendly features.

posted Monday, March 21, 2005

1 Comments:

By Fastmack:

I bought this player, and I have pretty much the exact opposite opinion of the review above. First of all, this player is an extremely good value, I payed $199 Canadian (around $160US). This includes the player, remote, lithium battery, AC adapter, DC Adapter, 2 sets of headphones, and a nylon carrying case that can be used to mount the unit on a headrest for rear vehicle passenger viewing. I'm extremely impressed by the value.

I will agree about the viewing angle of the screen, that it needs to be at a certain angle for the best viewing... so you adjust it to that angle, I don't really see the huge negative there.

As for requiring the remote to search, absolutely wrong. Obviously the reviewer hasn't spent much time with the unit's controls, there is both chapter search (left / right arrows) as well as FF / REV searching (by holding down those same arrows) available on the player. No remote required.

Also, I haven't found the end of the battery life for the lithium battery yet, but I'm well into my second movie and it's still going. (The salesman tried to tell me it was good for 12 hours... yah, right).

As for the connections... Again, what do you want for an entry-level player? dual headphone out (my unit came with a Y-adapter as well, for effective triple-headphone out), as well as stereo RCA out and RCA-style video output for connecting to a TV, etc. Do you really expect S-video or composite video outputs on a $199 player?

Anyway, the unit isn't perfect, and yes the lack of movie-position memory is mildly annoying, but I don't find it that big an issue either. I continue to be impressed with this player (no I don't work for Mintek), and I would (and have) recommended it to those who are in the market for this.

P.S. A device such as this strongly falls into the "I didn't know I needed it until I got it, now I can't imagine why I waited so long" category. Get one and you'll see what I mean.

posted at 6/16/2005 8:43 PM