Customer Reviews

RCA DRC257N DVD Player

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

 

 

I Have never been crazy about any RCA products but the price was right and I needed an inexpensive upconverting player fast.

First off the up converting on this player is awesome! Even my back-up dvd looked phenomenal. however through the HDMI cable this player did not seam to do a very good job of separating the audio through a 5.1 receiver. Front and rear speakers seamed to be playing the exact same thing. Bummer!! I ended up taking this back to the store and purchasing a Panasonic DVD-53k which is supposed to upconvert to 1080p. Well my DLP TV recognizes the Panasonic as a 1080p signal but the picture is noticeably grainier than the RCA player. But the Panasonic does a wonderful job with the 5.1 audio. If only the RCA did as good as a job with the 5.1 audio.

I am an avid electronics fan and have not had any problems ever with any piece of equipment that I have bought. Until now. This DVD player is not good. The picture is awesome (when it shows up). You often have to shut off the dvd player and then start it back up for the sound or picture to work using the hdmi output. Very annoying.

I bought this DVD player becuase I purchased a widescreen LCD HDTV and wanted a good dvd player with an HDMI out port on it to upscale my dvds to make them look better on my new tv. This dvd has worked flawlessly. It has an HDMI port, composite out and component out and has a 9 in 2 card reader so you can watch slide shows of your images straight from your camera cards it can also read mp3s from those cards to make a music slide show. This dvd player comes built in with TV Guardian which can filter out foul language on dvds, I havent tried this feature out so I cant really comment on it. I would recommend this dvd player to anyone wanting to spend a little more to get HDMI support to upscale dvds. It is very sleek looking out of the box in a wide but thin stance. Great buy!

I don't think mom or dad had one problem with it. At first we thought some kid did something to it and messed up the Tv guardian but after further inspection and rewiring dad got it to work so thank you Mr.Seller. haha a curse free movie night is so wonderful!!!! thank you thank you!

I bought this for the TV Guardian feature to replace my last RCA DVD player. The prior player was a replacement for another RCA DVD player. All different models, all purchased for the TV Guardian feature. None have lasted more than 8 or 9 months. For the cheap price I was willing to consider it a "disposable" item the first couple of times. I guess I'll try something else. when they worked they were OK using component and optical outputs. Getting the HDMI output to work was a constant battle not worth fighting on this unit.

I bought this little lemon a few months ago to connect to an older T.V. It seemed to have all the features I wanted, at the right price. Plus, another RCA (the DRC 285) was highly rated by Consumer Reports, so I figured, how bad could this be?

Little did I know I was about to enter the 7th circle of electronics hell.

At first, it was a fine little device. Easy to hook up, good picture. Some minor quibbles: A remote with teeny tiny buttons that only my 2-year old could push, and the fact that that the designers, perhaps in a paroxysm of contempt for the cheapskates among us who don't want to spend three figures on a soon-to-be-obsolete piece of landfill fodder, decided that the little red indicator light on the front of the unit should be on when the unit is in standby or off mode, and off when the unit is on. Not a big deal, but it confused the heck out of my dear little old mother.

Almost exactly a month after the purchase, the real fun started. It suddenly stopped turning on. Immediately upon pushing the power button, the drawer would open and it would go into standby mode, where it would remain for about 10 minutes (no amound of fiddling with the buttons would make it do anything,) after which it would inexplicably close the drawer and begin functioning. As if this were not irritating enough, I also found that there was a brief window of opportunity once the drawer closed in which to press "play." Otherwise, the unit would once again revert to standby. At that point, the only way out of the mess would be to unplug the little bugger and begin the routine anew after letting its nibs rest for a few minutes.

If, against all odds, I managed to get the thing fired up and playing, it quite often would inexplicably lose the picture after a few minutes, a state of affairs that would persist for some minutes, then resolve just as mysteriously. It became quite a game of chance in our household to guess how long it would be before the picture would quit, then return. (The record was 23 minutes.)

If you're looking for a reasonable facscimile of a DVD player, look elsewhere. If, however, you want a really great parting gift for your former evil boss, or your interfering dragon-lady of a mother-in-law, you couldn't do better than the RCA DRC275n.

Worked fine for a while. To bad it was only for about two months. This was the SECOND RCA dvd player I had bought from Walmart after the first one died. I replaced the original thinking it was a fluke, giving RCA the benefit of the doubt. However, the DRC257N player continues to lock up after five to ten minutes of playing. It now sits in its original box in my closet.

plays everything I throw at it, AVI, DIVX, XVID and the best part is it will play videos from the card slot. I now store all my movies on my computer as 750mb AVIs, when I want to watch something I put it on a 1GB CF card (takes about 45 seconds to transfer) and can watch it in 1080i on my HDTV. . .gotta love that.

People who are having trouble with discs behaving flakey, if you are using an HDMI switch that could be the culprit. I was having similar troubles and switched to a manual AB switch and all is good now.

Only gripe I have is if you leave the screen saver on for too long it turns off, great if you have a plasma or are worried about burn in, but a pain if you pause for too long.

I bought this unit about a month ago. I've seen the same issues that others have mentioned, the fast forward problem, the need to turn the unit off then on to get HDMI output. So far it quite happily plays all my discs. And the upconverted video looks good, if the disc is from a film source. For any source that started life as video vs a movie or film, the only output option that works is the 480p. Both the 720p and 1080i outputs are skewed vertically. Part of the bottom of the picture is at the top. Only on 480p does it look correct. Not the best feature, but then original source video isn't going to look too good regardless of resolution so I can live with this failure.

What I can't live with is the players inability to output the DTS soundtrack. Now I can understand the cost savings of not including DTS decoding in the player. But the digital output should still work regardless, after all, its just moving the bits from the disc to the output. My amplified will do the decoding. But this player just goes mute on my DTS discs.

All in all, if this product worked and did the things it should, like have a fast forward that was only on when the button was pressed and didn't need repeated presses of the play button or reverse to turn it off. Like being able to properly upconvert video source to 720p or 1080i not just film source. Like being able to output the digital signal from a DTS disc. Like always outputting a signal on the HDMI without needing to be turned off then on til it does. Then it would be a 5 star product.

I am now on my 3rd unit in 4 months. After 2 months of normal use the player would freeze and not power back on. This was the exact problem with the first one and second one as well. I will soon find out on the 3rd one but I expect it to fail.
It is a shame though because the picture and features are awsome.
It is annoying to have to power down everytime before a show to get the audio to go throug the HDMI cable.
So far I am 2 for 2 defects. That is unexceptable.