Price Tag: $99.99 (Occasionally found on sale for under $70.)
Official URL: radioshack.com
Rating:

Still considered a rather new product category, portable DVD players offer parents a tantalizing array of benefits for their kids. They are the little portable TV that can come along on family trips, be a quick media fix for a sick child’s bedroom, or keep kids entertained in their half of the living room.

In the weeks we spent with the Accurian DVD player, we found it to be lightweight, easy to use, and sporting a decent feature set.

FEATURES

This DVD player offers a 7″ wide screen. An important addition is its handy toggle for switching from widescreen to standard (i.e., old fashioned) 4:3 screen mode depending on what you’re watching. It also offers stereo speakers, CD and MP3 playback, a palm-sized remote control, a rechargeable battery with a (claimed) 2.5 hour battery life, a car lighter power adapter, support for subtitles and other common DVD features, a headphone jack and AV Out which allows you to use an additional or larger monitor.

THE SCREEN

The screen is acceptably bright and offers a decent image, similar to that found on other low to medium-end LCD TVs. It has some shadowing and vignetting issues that show up as varying brightness around the edges of the screen. The image is not super-sharp but it doesn’t come across as being blurry or pixelated, and even smallish text remains legible on the screen. The overall screen quality is acceptable, but if it were any much worse we would start taking exception.

The screen measures approximately 6 1/4″ wide by 3 1/2″ tall and gives a wide screen image that is 7″ diagonal. Its viewing angle seems generous and would comfortably allow for at least two children to watch a program at the same time. Perhaps more.

The screen is visible even under sunlight, although you’ll want to boost the brightness up. I found indoor use to be comfortable at the -2 setting, car use during daylight hours was good at 0, and using it outside required a +2 (but really, if it’s that nice a day, stow the DVDs!). The brightness control goes all the way up to +20, but the picture starts losing detail past +5.

The one thing that I would call “outstanding” about the screen is its ability to resist fingerprints. Every shiny surface of our home is COVERED with toddler fingerprints. This screen has been poked and prodded by little fingers as well, yet shows none of them when the unit is powered on.

THE AUDIO

The audio quality from the speaker of this DVD player is somewhat thin and unimpressive in quality. However its volume is generous and perfectly loud enough for use within a reasonable distance of the player. This means that multiple viewers can be a few feet back and all hear without any straining.

A decent pair of headphones make the quality of audio MUCH better, but be aware that only a single pair of headphones is supported at a time. Higher end portable DVD players offer multiple headphone jacks, a feature much appreciated by parents of more than one child. Headphone jack splitters are another option, but we did not test how well this unit would do with powering 2 headphones. Our guess is it would be ok if both sets of headphones were efficient, for example iPod style earplugs (how safe those are for little kids is another matter!).

MP3 & CD PLAYBACK

If you close the unit while playing MP3s or CDs, the LCD will turn off to conserve battery power, but the audio will continue to. This is perhaps my favorite feature, since my son tends to sit entranced and stare at screens even if all that is showing is a logo or list of songs. I love being able to use this to play his CDs in his room while he’s playing without worrying that the screen is distracting him.

When playing CDs, the tracks are named Track01, Track02, etc. When playing back MP3 CDs the tracks display the names- up to 20 characters. Since 20 characters only takes up about half the width of the display it’s somewhat disappointing that the whole song name isn’t displayed, or that song names don’t allow up to 40 characters.

Note: While this DVD player plays burned DVDs and MP3s that are burned to CDs, it does NOT play MP3s burned to DVD media. If you want to play MP3 CDs make sure that you burn the CD in “ISO” format and not UDF format. I made a few coasters with Windows Vista’s default burning software and settings before I figured this one out.

THE REMOTE & CONTROLS

The on-the-unit controls are quite sparse. Stop, pause, play, previous scene, next scene, wide screen toggle, and menu buttons are located on the upper half of the control interface. Below that is a navigation control panel with up, down, left and right buttons and an “OK” button. The cursor buttons have double function. The left and right buttons act as fast-forward and fast-reverse buttons, and the up and down buttons allow you to increase or decrease the brightness of the screen without needing to use the remote or navigate the menus.

The remote control is about the height and width of a credit card and is about as thick as 4-5 cards stacked.

The remote control has 28 buttons that take up nearly its entire front surface, and that are arranged in simple rows. The remote has these buttons: Setup, Display, Zoom, Sub, “Previous Scene”, Up, “Next Scene”, A-B Repeat, Fast Reverse, Enter, Fast Forward, 1/All, Down, Stop, Menu, Audio, Angle, Play/Pause, and the numbers 0-9.

The remote comes pre-loaded with a replaceable non-rechargeable C2025 (Button Cell) battery which has an excellent battery life.

THE BATTERY LIFE

Battery life appears to be decent if not really impressive. The battery is supposed to hold a charge for about two and a half hours worth of play. In our experience it lasts closer to about one and a half hours of video playback. The battery requires 5 hours of charging time to be fully charged.

While the unit comes with a car power adapter to plug into your lighter, this is unfortunately only good for playing and does not allow recharging of the battery. AC power is needed for recharging. This is a shame and needlessly ties you to electricity sources–bummer for camping enthusiasts.

The battery is probably the real weakness of this unit. Other units at a slightly higher price points have stated battery lives of 3-5 hours. To compound the issues, the battery is sealed into the machine so you don’t even have the option of buying an additional battery pack or buying replacement batteries for those times where you foolishly let your husband do the packing and the AC adapter never makes it into the suitcase (…but I digress!).

COMPATIBILITY & VERSATILITY

We found this unit had some real issues playing certain DVDs, including popular titles like the “Thomas the Tank Engine” DVDs. It simply will not recognize that these DVDs are in the player. While about 85% of my son’s DVDs will play, about 15% will not. This seems to be an issue of copy protection software that the manufacturer simply did not license for this player. This can be a serious problem for some users.

All of our tested audio CDs played just fine. Home-brewed discs were a mixed bag though. Our home brew baby videos played wonderfully for the most part, but it didn’t recognize all of our burned discs. It seems that DVD+R media was rather hit-or-miss. Again, this can become a very serious problem for many users.

One interesting feature of this DVD player that I saw reported in various places was that it is “region free”. This is not true by default, although there are apparently ways to set this using the remote control (which I verified to be correct in units made as recently as February 2009). This is not mentioned in the manual and I’m not sure if doing so voids the warranty or breaks any laws so I’d recommend against doing this.

CHILD FRIENDLINESS

There are a mix of “friendly” and “unfriendly” aspects to this player when using it with children.

Friendly: Light weight and small size means that your child can carry it from place to place easily. The buttons on the DVD player itself are limited and easy for a toddler and older kids to figure out. This player seems to cope well with slightly rough treatment and withstands bumps, small drops, poking of the screen, rough treatment of the interface buttons, throwing of the remote, a 40lb toddler standing on the DVD player to try to climb onto a shelf… You know, normal stuff. Finally, the mechanism for opening the DVD door is a “slide” mechanism which is harder for a young child to accidentally hit in the middle of watching his favorite video. All good!

Unfriendly: This DVD player seems to be on the slightly more finicky side of requiring DVDs to be clean, scratch-free and free of fingerprints. It has a moderate level of tolerance for the normal state of children’s DVDs, but don’t expect it to work well with “well used” rental DVDs or DVDs borrowed from the library. The remote control must be kept away from young children, as the battery can be fatal if swallowed, and the battery is not secured within the remote unit at all.

Ultimately, this DVD player is like all portable DVD players. It’s not intended to be a children’s toy, and should not be used unsupervised.

PARENTAL CONTROLS

Parental controls allow you to easily restrict the player to only allow videos to play if they are rated for or below the following levels: G, PG, PG-13, R, or NC-17. Parental controls are disabled by default.

When parental controls are enabled, if a disc that has a more advanced rating is inserted, a password prompt will appear and unless the parental controls password is entered, the DVD will not play. This means that if you set the unit to PG-13 then G, PG, and PG-13 videos will play but R and NC-17 videos will not play without a password. CD Audio is not effected by Parental Controls, so keep any CDs with explicit lyrics well hidden. DVDs that are “Not Rated” will also still play, so any bedroom directors out there need to keep those discs under serious lock and key (as my  husband jokes).

IN THE BOX

The Accurian 7″ player comes with a remote control, a vehicle lighter adapter, an A/V Cable, an AC Adapter, User Guide, and a 90 day Parts and Labor warranty.

SPECS

When closed this unit is 7.52 inches long, 1.5 inches high and 6.3 inches wide. It weighs 1.59lbs.

BOTTOM LINE

This DVD player is a mix of good and bad. If you think of it as a portable entertainment center it probably doesn’t live up to the name. But if you think of it as a slightly expensive children’s toy, suddenly it seems like a wonderful bargain.

If you have children that are old enough to not drop or destroy electronics you might want to invest in a slightly more expensive player that will be more appealing to the whole family. If you have a child that is under 8 that hasn’t yet learned to treat things gently, the affordable price point and design of this unit make it a serious contender.