Philips HTS5100B/F7 Blu-ray 7.1 channel Home Theater system

by Philips

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 15.3 x 17.2 x 2.7 inches ; 35.3 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 42 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B002JTWSEQ
• Item model number: HTS5100B/F7
• Average Customer Review: 2.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #104,606 in Electronics (See Top 100 in Electronics)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: January 1, 2009

Product Description

Philips BD/DVD 7.1 channel Home Theater system

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good sounding system, but mis-advertised, July 2, 2010

By 

terthen (San Diego, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Philips HTS5100B/F7 Blu-ray 7.1 channel Home Theater system (Electronics)

Recently purchased the Philips HTS5100B/F7 Blu-Ray home theater system. It is quick to setup. The sound quality is pretty good, and for a small apartment this is an excellent system. The bass is strong but slightly boomy at high volumes, but I didn't need to go to that high of volumes to really enjoy the blu-ray i put in (the Dark Knight). This system is best for playing movies, music was OK as well but the strength is definitely within movies.

Limitations:
1) NO USB port, so you cannot plug in a USB drive and play divx or other video files off it. The manual says you cannot play video files from the SD card slot.
2) It is NOT 7.1, only 5.1 and there is no place to plug in any extra speakers
3) Speaker wires have plugins so it will be difficult to extend the speakers, you'd have to clip the wires and add them in the middle
4) Only 1 optical input, so you can only add 1 device this way.

Overall, the MSRP is definitely too high, although on sale prices it's very reasonable if you don't expect 7.1 or a USB port.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars nothing fancy., July 21, 2010

By 

Marc G - See all my reviews

This review is from: Philips HTS5100B/F7 Blu-ray 7.1 channel Home Theater system (Electronics)

make sure to get it on sale. MSRP is way too high.
I was lucky enough to find this one on clearance end cap of target for an absurd $125 down from $500.

This is the only reason i went with this model and i am not disapointed with the sound for the price and I would have proably spent twice that but definatley not 500 for this unit

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Either We Bought a Defective Unit...or These Generally Suck., July 30, 2010

By 

TDe "Tara" (RI, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Philips HTS5100B/F7 Blu-ray 7.1 channel Home Theater system (Electronics)

Complaints:

1.) This unit is ridiculously overpriced here on Amazon. If I paid that much for mine and it acts this way...I would go postal on Philips.

2.) As others helpfully pointed out, despite the title here on Amazon and what the BOX ITSELF says, this is NOT a 7 channel system...only 5. I mentioned this to Philips in my complaint letter and they conveniently overlooked this minor issue.

3.) It's slow. Waiting for discs to load or turning on the speakers is annoying.

4.) The system MAY not have enough internal memory to play blu-rays. This information is only found on the Philips website after we went digging to troubleshoot the other issue (below) we were having with it. Philips recommends you use insert a 1GB SD card if your blu-rays start playing funky. Of course there are a few caveats here...a.) the system may/may not work with sd cards formatted on your computer, but luckily you can use the system to format the sd card (supposedly). We tried 4 different SD cards of different capacities and not only would the system not format them - we kept getting "Initialize Incomplete" when trying to do so - it would not work if we formatted the cards on our computer, either.

Now here is the actual issue we had with the player that may/may not be just our unit. For a while we thought we were just playing dvds/blu-ray discs that were scratched somewhere. We even went as far as returning a disc to a company complaining they were selling defective discs because surely a brand new home theatre system could not be at fault...right?

Well we soon figured out that it was the system. The system is inconsistent with what it plays and does not. We got 2 minutes into a blu-ray and the video started skipping and the sound would just stop working (not turn off; it stayed on but just wouldn't play audio). It does this with dvds, divx files...everything. Some movies it will play all the way though without a problem...the very next viewing it would skip. Take it out and and try to replay it and it would get through the parts it was previously freezing and skipping through and censoring the audio, only to do it at another point of the movie. We spent hours troubleshooting the issue and finally came to the conclusion that it is the system.

I sent Philips a very frustrated email and they got back to me a few days later. Long story short, because I bought this system less than 30 days ago they are going to send me a new system and a prepaid postage label to mail back our screwed up one. Hopefully the issues we experienced with the skipping, freezing, and shaky audio were just this unit and the new one will be trouble-free...but I will update this review if I find the next system is just as crappy as mine is.