Philips PET1030 Portable DVD Player

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Philips PET1030 Portable DVD Player

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I like just about everything in the control array.

I especially like the fact that the player will play just about any kind of video format, including .avi files. I've been able to play files off my camcorder as well as shows I've recorded on TV using my DVD recorder. I've yet to find a disc that I couldn't play on it. And I've used the S video cord to play things on my TV that my normal DVD player is not able to. Finally, I like the fact that you can flip the screen over so that the player will fold up to the size of a hardback book. I'm able to adapt the display screen to just about any situation I'm in.

So, all in all I'm delighted with this player. The battery is great. I've taken the player to coffee shops and played a long string of TV episodes without any difficulty. I give this about as high a recommendation as is possible. Just make sure that you do the firmware update. If you do you'll find this to be pretty much a perfect player.

Philips PET1030 Portable DVD Player

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I like just about everything in the control array.



I especially like the fact that the player will play just about any kind of video format, including .avi files. I've been able to play files off my camcorder as well as shows I've recorded on TV using my DVD recorder. I've yet to find a disc that I couldn't play on it. And I've used the S video cord to play things on my TV that my normal DVD player is not able to. Finally, I like the fact that you can flip the screen over so that the player will fold up to the size of a hardback book. I'm able to adapt the display screen to just about any situation I'm in.



So, all in all I'm delighted with this player. The battery is great. I've taken the player to coffee shops and played a long string of TV episodes without any difficulty. I give this about as high a recommendation as is possible. Just make sure that you do the firmware update. If you do you'll find this to be pretty much a perfect player.

Philips PET1030 Portable DVD Player

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Yes, I will need to have it serviced in order to change the battery eventually, but I don't mind as a unit with smaller dimensions was more important to me. This unit is very stylish and look fantastic. Plus it comes with a remote that the kids can use while in the car. The unit has pretty good sound for a portable, and is loud enough for adequate level of hearing amongst road noise while in travel. The chapter marker icon issue that other reviews have mentioned indeed is true, but the firmware update available on the Philips website solves the problem. You'll just need to be able to burn a CD with the correct format (see Philips website for instructions) and follow their directions and the chapter icons issue is solved. I purchased the Philips travel/car mount case that is supposed to hold the 10" size, and although it fits, it is a tight fit. The case that comes with unit is fine for transporting the unit and does mount to the headrest of a front car seat, but it doesn't mount between seats, which is what I require as I have two kids. It took a bit of work to finally land the best unit, so save yourself the time and go with this unit, you'll be glad you did. The picture quality and color is the best you'll find as of Feb. 9, 2008.

Philips PET1030 Portable DVD Player

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design of the playback system. On startup it's much worse - it sounds like the stepper motor is trying to shake itself apart. I purchased this portable player for home personal use where I sit near the player and watch the DVD using the internal speakers on the DVD player, so the noise is very conspicuous, particularly during quiet sections of a film. People using headphones, or using the player for car playback, presumably won't notice because good headphones will likely block the player noise, and in a car there's so much background noise anyway that it will drown out any DVD player noise.

When I compared the Philips to my old Toshiba, I found that the Toshiba makes some noise during a chapter seek, but is fairly quiet during regular playback.

- Design flaw: control buttons located on screen panel rather than player base. Philips presumably thought this would be a great idea, to put the control buttons along the bottom of the screen. However the result of this design choice is that to press any button, you now have to press forward horizontally, against your screen -- the typical result is that the entire DVD unit tips over backwards, or just the screen tips backwards. By comparison, with a DVD player that has the buttons mounted on the base of the player, you push buttons DOWN, which doesn't tip your player over. I found that I had to immediately shift to using the remote for the Philips player rather than the control buttons on the player itself. It's rather ridiculous that I should have to find myself using the remote for a player that's sitting in my lap.

- Design flaw: color contrast of control button labels. Philips has chosen to use a dark blue font for the text labels on the control buttons, against a black plastic background. In dim light - such as the light level you're likely to choose when trying to watch a DVD - this text is completely unreadable. When I compare to my old Toshiba player, I see that Toshiba chose to use a high-contrast black text against a silver plastic background. Toshiba appears to understand design for usability, Philips doesn't.

- Design flaw: No power button on the remote. Others have complained about this and it's true. Every single remote control I own for my home stereo has a power button on the remote, so this is something that consumer electronics manufacturers have been doing for at least 10 years, but Philips didn't do it for this player. Ridiculous.

- Design flaw: overly aggressive magnetic clasp closure system. I find this player very difficult to open - it uses two fairly strong magnets and no physical clasp. So to open it, I have to use both hands and stick a thumbnail into the slot between the screen (upper half) and the base (lower half), then pry the pieces apart.

- Design flaw: unattractive cover over the DVD. For whatever reason, Philips chose to make the lid (the plastic piece that covers that DVD while playing) into a full-width 10" by 5.5" piece of plastic, even though they could have designed a lid only half that size. It's also completely smooth on top, with no design elements. The result is that it feels and moves like a piece of plastic that a junior high school student cut on the plastic cutting machine in shop class. It makes the player feel cheap, and when combined with some of the other flaws gives me an overall impression of lousy attention to consumer needs or usability.

- Design flaw: long startup delays. The Philips player suffers from the "creeping long boot time disease" which infected Microsoft a long time ago and now appears to have become acceptable in consumer electronics. The issue here is: how many seconds does it take after power-on for the player to display video played from the actual DVD? I tested this against my old Toshiba and found that for the same DVD, the Philips (manufactured in 2007) takes 21 seconds from power-on to start playing the DVD, while the Toshiba, manufactured in 2001, takes 9 seconds. This isn't progress, this is moving backwards, by over a factor of two.

- NOT a flaw, working just fine: screen pixel count. I've seen various reviews, particularly on Pricegrabber, complaining about how this unit shows images as "pixelated" or how it doesn't have a sufficiently high resolution. These reviewers are uninformed. DVD-Video resolution using the NTSC standard (as vs. PAL) is 720x480 pixels, and this player has a screen resolution of 800x480, so it's able to display every single pixel that's been encoded onto the DVD. A higher resolution on the DVD player screen won't help, since there's no additional pixel information available on the DVD -- 720x480 is as high as you get with non-highdef DVDs at NTSC, unless you play games with upconversion. My speculation is that the reviewers complaining about a "pixel" effect are used to watching movies on a CRT or other screen that provides some natural blurring - they're not accustomed to actually seeing down to the single-pixel resolution, so people perceive the quality as worse when actually the Philips is displaying exactly what it's supposed to. I found the picture quality to be excellent - definitely better than the quality on my aging Toshiba player from 2001, which only has half the screen resolution.

Conclusion: unacceptable for my needs, and contains a number of flaws that make me question whether Philips is doing proper usability or mechanical testing. I returned it, and plan to investigate Toshiba's 10" portable DVD player offering as an alternative.

Philips PET1030 Portable DVD Player

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has the option to get rid of the chapter pop-up.

Philips PET1030 Portable DVD Player

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without any issues. However when stored on a 1G SD card the audio track of the movie has very noticeable static. Therefore we will store our videos either on a USB stick or burn a DVD and use the SD card only for JPGs from our digital camera. At times we need to leave the player unattended during public events. The 1 4" screw hole on the back is great to connect the car mount kit but not a good solution to deter thieves. We wish the player had an oval hole like laptops in order to attach a Kensington cable lock.

For (2) we put the player on a shelf that is about two feed away from the exercise equipment. The image size and the loudness of the built-in speaker are more than adequate during typical home exercises.

Overall we love this player and are happily using it.

Philips PET1030 Portable DVD Player

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just touch the button once for chapter advance or hold it down for fast forward. Another feature I like is that it will often return to the previous location of a movie I was watching when I turned the machine off when I reached my bus stop. This feature works sometimes and doesn't work sometimes.

The reason I have given this machine four stars and decided to write a review is because of the problems I have encountered and the results of those problems.

The first machine I had began to have a problem of freezing from time to time in mid-movie as if there were a problem with the disk. During the freeze, it would make a whirring sound inside. I determined that it was a machine malfunction and not a disk problem because it got worse over time and continued on all of my DVD's. I called the technical assistance and they were very helpful. I sent back the defective unit (more than $11 in postage that I paid). They replaced it with a "new" machine in a very short time.

The next unit I used, was a slight upgrade of the returned machine, but was white and came without a carrying case (the first unit was black and had come with a carrying case). So, now I had to buy a carrying case from Amazon.com (Targus DVD001 13 Portable DVD Player Case for $24.68 and worth twice that - 5 stars).

This "new" unit began to have problems from the start. It would work fine for two trips, then on the third trip, it would have problems turning on and off. The button for the power just would refuse to work. So, I called technical support once again, and once again, they were very helpful. Back goes the defective unit and I get another "new" replacement (also, I'm out another $11+ in postage).

Please re-read the previous two paragraphs to see what happened next (except that this "new" machine was not another upgrade, but was identical to the defective machine that I returned).

As you can see, I am now out more than $57 in postage and purchase of a carrying case, and am on my fifth DVD player since June (this is November). On receiving my two latest machines (my fourth and fifth replacement units), I was given the replacement before having to return the defective unit. It also came with a prepaid FedEx label, so I am not out a fourth or fifth round of postage. In all this time, Philips has been very good about sending replacements promptly and have been easy to get a hold of on the phone in order to make the arrangements. I give their customer satisfaction 5 stars. I give 4 stars to the machine due to the hassle it has caused me. I suspect that the previous replacement units were also returns from others, and they could not "duplicate the problem".

I believe that I now have a new DVD player as it so far has worked flawlessly (knock on wood), and it even takes significantly less time to recharge than the others took. If Philips can work out their quality control problems, they will definitely have a 5 star DVD player.

Philips PET1030 Portable DVD Player

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+ Firmware Upgrade Software

Posted Date: 10/17/2007 Version = 070911

Now take it from there.

Make sure you read the Readme file before doing anything. You have to follow exactly what it says or it won't work.

Philips PET1030 Portable DVD Player

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in the background, but I can still hear the dialog just fine. It's even better with headphones on, which I prefer. It doesn't have 2 headphone jacks but it does have a line out jack which is loud enough to listen to through headphones even with another set of headphones hooked up to the phone jack. Battery life is fine. It lasts for about 1 1/2 to 2 DVD's depending on the length of the movie of course. Using the USB is a snap and will increase the battery life by quite a bit. I think I watched about the whole first season of Weeds off my USB drive before the battery died. The biggest grief I have about it is it's hard to find a nice case for it. Most of the 10 in.+ cases for portable DVD players are bulky. I don't want the bulk that most of them have because my space is very limited to store personal things. With the hard to find cases and the chapter numbers being displayed on the screen I give it 4.7 stars. I don't think that the few short comings deserve it to lose a whole star over it. This is a great DVD player and I would highly recommend it, even to my Mom.

Philips PET1030 Portable DVD Player

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in the background, but I can still hear the dialog just fine. It's even better with headphones on, which I prefer. It doesn't have 2 headphone jacks but it does have a line out jack which is loud enough to listen to through headphones even with another set of headphones hooked up to the phone jack. Battery life is fine. It lasts for about 1 1/2 to 2 DVD's depending on the length of the movie of course. Using the USB is a snap and will increase the battery life by quite a bit. I think I watched about the whole first season of Weeds off my USB drive before the battery died. The biggest grief I have about it is it's hard to find a nice case for it. Most of the 10 in.+ cases for portable DVD players are bulky. I don't want the bulk that most of them have because my space is very limited to store personal things. With the hard to find cases and the chapter numbers being displayed on the screen I give it 4.7 stars. I don't think that the few short comings deserve it to lose a whole star over it. This is a great DVD player and I would highly recommend it, even to my Mom.