Very, Very Poor

Had nothing but problems with this machine; painfully slow, noisy, records when it feels like it, freezes, stalls and has now finally packed up althogether with a disc in it. The help from Philips website and phone operatives have failed to rectify the problem.

I would avoid at all costs.

A waste of money

We bought a Phillips DVDR 5500 and have had nothing but problems with it. As many other reviewers have said it freezes regularly and the only cure is by unplugging it at the mains. You can record DVD's with it as its name suggests but the DVD's are only readable by it and my computer, THEY WILL NOT READ ON ANY OTHER DVD PLAYER even expensive new ones. We found this out because we recorded loads of VCR's to DVD with it only to find that we cannot play them on anything else meaning that we have to keep the box anyway.

Because of the freezing problem we sent it back to Phillips and they `tried' to fix it and only ended up making it freeze more often and loose the time afterwards. Now Phillips are saying that Currys (where we bought it) should replace it and Currys are saying that Phillips should replace it.

My advice, steer clear from this and by something else.

Nice Unit

Feature rich unit with a much more friendly menu system than experience on some Philips equipment. Implementation of Divx works well, but can only use the time search function to skip through the movie, not the normal forward and rewind buttons.
Easily converted to Multi region, information widely available through a search engine. My only dislikes are the mechanical noise which is higher than some units and this cheap remote control that Philips seem to use across most of their range. For the price... great buy

Do not buy this DVD player

How this machine made it passed Philips testing I will never know, but please do not waste your money on it. Even trying to eject a Disk from the player is itself a heavy task. The Display comes up with Blocked 3 to 4 times before finally after you have pressed Eject for the fifth time (which takes about 2 minutes doing so) the player finally decides to give up and return your disk to you. Junk is the only way to describe this machine.

Bad Bad Product from Philips

A number of years ago I bought a Philips DVD-RW with USB. I plug in my HDD and watched movies or photo's from my HDD. I bought this unit, also has USB, BUT only for pendrives...WHAT!, Yes. The freeview interface is just, well, not good. Press the record button and the unit tells you to hang on for a while, it needs to prepare the internal HDD, WHAT! Press the HDD button and select a file for replay and it tells you to wait a while... Here's a fantastic feature, Plug your Satellite receiver into the scart socket, put another thingy in front of the sat box... Didn't work because has to be a sat receiver from their list. This unit feels like Philips took a lot of different modules and connected it all together and it's not working well. The unit looks fantastic on the shelf, but even at the cheap price I got it at, it's still a waste of time and shelf space. The upscaling lies in the eye of the beholder. I'm glad I didn't get rid of my 80GB cheapy PVR i picked up a long time ago. It still works better than this Philips attempt at PVR. No user should endure this kind of rip-off. these consumer products should 'just work' when you plug it in. Spending hours with its user manual is not on! I turned it on tonight to see what's worth watching on TV and ther was no data for the channels. A message popped up telling me to leave the unit on standby while it downloads new software..., but I want to watch TV! The remote control is no help either, I am still looking for the button that's supposed to open and close the DVD tray. This unit is the class idiot; it drags my complete home cinema system down. Amazon, please introduce a zero star rating!

Great If You Like Everyone To Have A Red Face on HDMI

I bought this item yesterday from Tesco. Took it back today as everyone had a red face on the screen when using HDMI thru freeview.

Apart from that:

DVD Recorder: Seemed ok little difficult to use didn't really use that much in the 24hrs i had it.
HDD Recorder: I had a BT Vision box which was made by Philips which was very easy to use just click the (R) button when you wanted to recorded something and press it twice to record the entire series (like SKY+). I was hoping for the same thing with this purchase, i was so wrong. Very complicated interface it is like setting an old VCR, if you press REC it started recording from there (not like BT Vision where it started recording from the point you started watching it). Pausing Live (you had to make sure that the HDD was activated first) the screen went blank for bout 5 secs then paused. Picture Quality was good apart from everyone having a red outline when using Freeview thru HDMI, you could change the quality of recording so you can double the amount of record time on the 160 GB HDD. If you were recording a channel you had to watch that channel and there is no recording 2 programs at once (thou you could watch a DVD)

DVD Player: Very good quality especially using HDMI the pictures were Upscalled brilliantly almost to Blu Ray.

Overall:

Brilliant DVD Player in HDMI - 5 Star
Great Recorder using normal Scart - 4 Star
Rubbish Recorder if using HDMI - 0 Star

Unreliable junk

Looks good, sounds good...but it just isn't. Very light use and got 12 months glitch free. Last 12 months increasingly errant begaviour. Philips not interested. Yet another addition to the lengthening list of reviewers who have experienced failure with the playback and reading of DVD on this machine. Save your money or buy anything other than this machine.

buy it now

very good value for money many features like usb playback and many disk formats supported about 5month in to it still pleased.

A MUST BUY DVD PLAYER!!

Anyone looking for a top-notch and cost effective DVD player. Look no further, you've found it!!: Its the PHILIPS DVP 520 Multi Region capable DVD Player.

It plays EVERY single disc under the sun - straight out of the box too , theres not even any need to use the hack code. I recently bought"and returned" the Sony DVP-NS355 Multi-region DVD Player because while it was a nice little player, it does not play Region 1 DVDs - unless you'd like to fork out more cash to buy a remote to hack it - which i did not.

Anyway - It really does go to show you get what you pay for and you get a GREAT DEAL with this player.

Great DVD

I've had my Pet800 for nearly 4 months now and it seems all good so far, the playback quality is sharp with the mini LCD screen, the screens bigger then most portable DVD players, and its multi-region!
Battery life is good also for a portable player and u can plug it in2 a tv and use it like any other DVD player of need be.

All in all I cant yet fault it.

poor

started off ok. dvdbroke within 10 months.u cannot buy replacement dvd player.phillips do not have any spare parts 2 fix the problem.all the speakers are now in effect.USELESS.advise not to buy.

A real let down - avoid!

Buying the Philips name means you expect a good quality electronic product.
However, whilst the sound quality is good, after just over a year, the dvd player froze, jumped and stuck on all discs. A dvd lens cleaner made no difference. Also, the on-screen display was very clunky and basic, rather than up front info, you have to scrawl down and down and down just to see the duration/length details of the dvd playing. The buttons are also very poor and unresponsive: you have to press them several times to function e.g. the disc eject, mode changer etc
I am now left with a great set of speakers but a dvd player that won't work! It's almost as if they spent all the money developing the sound system and added a cheap dvd player with it. Even my cheap £15 dvd player still works fine on all discs! Looking around the net, this seems to be a common problem with this model. What a waste and a shame. Poor show Philips.

Movies on the move

I bought this after a review in some newspaper recommended this, and have to say I (and the family) have been immensely pleased with it.

The picture quality is excellent, and viewable from a good range of angles. The sound through the intergrated speakers is fine, good enough for kids in a quiet room, although I recomend headphones to make the most of the unit.

The unit itself is exceptionally light, but seems sturdy enough. Claimed battery life is three hours - I've had two hours running time from it with no problems.

The included case at first appears lower quality, but again seems to do it's job well, and is the right size for holding all the chargers (car and 3 pin house plug chargers included) as well as a few discs. It also includes a remote control, although to be honest I would rather have sacrificed the remote for headphones - you aren't going to be watching movies from a distance so a remote seems an extravagance

My only other slight critism is that the disc needs to be inserted properly to work. Sometimes it looks like it is in, but it isn't quite.

Value for money, this rates 5 stars, picture quality 5 stars, headphone sound 4 stars, speaker sound 3 stars. It was in fact so good, we bought a second as a big family present. Recommended.