Customer Reviews

Initial 10.2" Portable DVD Player - IDM-1250

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

We bought this unit to replace a Polaroid that gave out after about 6 months. Fortunately we had purchased the unit thru Target.com with the $30 extended warranty so we got a full refund of our purchase price.

Initially (no pun intended ;-) I was concerned about some of the comments I had seen from other reviewers. Ill address them individually below.

- The comment about having to always select dvd or usb or card isnt present on my unit. It does prompt when you first turn it on, but without selecting something other than dvd it quickly defaults to dvd and just starts playing the dvd.

- The comment about large jpg's freezing the unit. Well I guess it depends on what your definition of freeze is (and Im also a little unclear how your 20D had a picture on an SD card given the 20D has a compact flash slot). On my unit I have taken the SD card straight from my canon S500 (7.1 Megapixel) and put it in the player and looked at photos. Granted it takes the unit awhile (ie. read slow) to read in the large photos from my camera but it does it without crashing the player etc.

- The build quality of the unit seems much more rugged than the polaroid it replaced so it appears to be a good unit, but unfortunately with portable dvd players the true test is the test of TIME.


Overall the reason we bought this player was because of DIVX. My daughter is a Wiggles, BluesClues, Hi-5 junkie. I record all of these shows on the Tivo (in Best Quality), transfer them to my PC, run them thru DirectshowDump, then thru the Divx encoder. I can get nearly 40 shows onto one DVD when they are all DIVX and the quality is just fine.


Ill revise this post later if the device dies an early death, otherwise if you dont see a post from me you can safely assume that it is still running without incident.

I purchased this unit thru Target.com which has Amazon as the backend processor. The unit arrived very quickly and with good packaging as Ive come to expect from Amazon.

--
John Cavanaugh

There are several picky cons I have with the player:

1. There is no auto - resume function. The previous player I had would resume playback from the last position if the disc was removed and reinserted or other functions on the unit interrupted playback. With this unit, it is easy to press a button (such as source or menu) and the player stops and restarts at the main menu rather than continuing.

2. There is no contrast adjustment. The screen adjustment controls are cumbersome at best.

3. The manual on USB and smart card use is near useless. Prepare to experiment.

4. The two magnetic catches for the screen reflect light brightly and sometimes distract from viewing the screen. They should have been colored black like the rest of the unit.

5. There are no fast forward and reverse control buttons on the unit, only on the remote (which is not upgraded from the earliest Initial DVD players).

6. The remote is minimalist: No A-B, repeat, etc. and the OSD is is gigantic!!! It covers the top 6th of the screen when on.

7. Most irritating is that when you turn the player on, you must menu select DVD, USB, or CARD every single time. The USB and CARD are for playing picture discs. This is a very bad design...the system should come up in DVD mode, and THEN you select with a button if you want to change to USB or CARD picture mode.

Bought unit yesterday
Impressed w/ screen quality. Plays my DVD's -R, +R, -RW. AV in/out is wonderful (not found in many units)
Has many buttons on unit, not remote.
At first USB port froze when connecting an outside source (I tried 3 types). Went back to CompUSA: Same Freeze problem! Initial was no help. Since I don't give up easily I tried again w/ Compusa geek: found out that large files (3MB pictures from a Canon 20D)freeze unit but if you reduce size of pix to 100-300KB the player works beautifully. I now use it at home as a Digital picture frame, showing 100's of pics flawlessly and in continuous mode!!
Except for Initial's support I would change rating to 5/5 on my edited review on the basis of quality of unit.

I got this a week ago at CompUSA and except for a couple of minor quibbles, I couldn't be happier with this dvd player.

The picture quality is terrific; way better than almost any other player I tried. If I hadn't compared picture quality between several different brands and models, I wouldn't have realized how important Progressive Scan is. The difference in picture quality was incredible between the non-progressive scan models and the 3 progressive scan models I used (this one, a Samsung, and a Philips). After seeing these, there's no way I could buy a portable that wasn't progressive scan. And at $280, the IDM-1250 was a lot cheaper than the Samsung and the Philips.

Sound quality through the tiny speakers is tinny, as you might imagine. It's clear but completely lacking in bass. But with headphones, the sound is excellent.

I really like that this one has so many outputs and inputs, and I find it amazing that a little guy like this has component video and digital audio outputs (although I haven't used them yet). I did use the composite output, though, to hook it up to a tv in a hotel this weekend, and the picture was excellent (much better than when I've hooked up my Dell laptop to a tv before).

This unit will play mp3 cd's and I suspect it will play mp3 dvd's but I haven't tried that yet. I hooked up my digital camera to the usb port, and while it was slow and not very high-res, I was able to show the pictures on the dvd player's screen. Very cool.

I also love the fact that it came with an a/c adapter, a car cord that plugs into the cigarette lighter, and a battery.

The only complaints I have are minor. There's no resume feature, so when you turn the unit off and then back on, it doesn't remember where it was. Kind of a pain, but not a deal-breaker for me. Also, while it's great that it comes with a remote, there are things you can only do using the remote, and other things you can only do *without* the remote. Not an ideal situation, but in a bargain basement unit like this, I think it's a reasonable trade-off for all the great features you get.

I'd never heard of the Initial brand before and I'm a little nervous about reliability. But my kids and I have watched probably half a dozen movies on it so far and it's been perfect, so I'm glad I took a chance on it.

Pros:
* Big screen
* Fantastic picture (progressive scan)
* Looks nice
* Quality feel
* Lots of inputs and outputs
* Can play movies and music and digital photos
* 2 headphone jacks
* Component video outputs
* 3 ways to power it (home, car, and battery)
* Low price compared to competition

Cons:
* No resume feature
* Remote doesn't control some features
* Unknown brand

The Bottom Line:
So far, this player is fantastic. It was a great purchase!

The IDM-1250 does have an A-B repeat mode to it, and what I like is when playing cd's you can keep the screen closed,and the advance buttons and pause and play buttons are on the front,so you don't need the remote to change to different tracks.The picture is just as good as the Philips with 12bit video dacs,and you get the added features of the multi-card reader and USB port.The sound is not bad as far as voulme through the built in speakers,but like other players using headphones makes quite a difference.I would recommend this player to those who like a larger screen portable,as a side note it will read dvd-rw in the vr-mode.

I have a Powerbook G4 with a 17" display that I was using to play DVD's. I thought it was too big and the battery life too short. I decided to purchased a dedicated portable DVD player. I was pleasantly surprised by the workmanship and the quality of the unit. I would highly recommend this player. I recommend the 10" screen.

This player has every feature imaginable. I work in the television broadcast industry and I must tell you that the the price tag for the features on this player well surpass it's competitor's prices. I've looked at a lot of players and they just don't match up to Initial's price and quality.

Initial's IDM-1250 player has excellent picture, sound(which is usually poor in most cheaper players) and the battery keeps going and going.....The player is nice to to look at too!

Generally, I feeel that I have invested my money well. Yes, the name brand may not be popular, but you get a 1 year manufacturers warranty.

Unfortunately, the IDM-1250 only plays Region 1 DVD's, but who cares; everything else is perfect!

When I got this DVD player I thouht it was great, the features are nice and the i/o ports are many. After about 3 weeks the super sensitive switch that shuts the lcd off when the lid closes started shutting the screen off even when the lid was open, the weight of the white plastic pin held the switch down. Then the next week the hinges gave out, they are solid metal hinges anchored to very soft and brittle plastic, very annoying.

I bought one of these units back in March from online Wal-Mart. The picture quality for DVD's was excellent. The sound was good too and it had many features not found in other competitors. I really started to like this unit a lot until I placed the CF card from my digital camera into their card slot. Again, the picture quality was excellent when in full screen mode. When viewing in thumbnail mode, the pictures were quite blurry. This was okay since I wouldn't normally use this mode anyway. What really turned me off was the slide show feature. Each picture is displayed for 30 seconds regardless of the picture's resolution. There was no button to force advancement to the next slide or to alter the time slice. This was unacceptable and the reason I returned the unit.

Plays any DVD easily. Easy access to controls on the front. Having the USB and sd card option is nice. For the money, and excellent product.