Sharp DV-L70U 7" Portable DVD Player

by Sharp

Product Details

• Item Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 5 pounds
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B00003GPVB
• Item model number: DVL70U
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (39 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #267,416 in Electronics (See Top 100 in Electronics)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

Amazon.com Review

Give Sharp's new portable DVD player some bonus frequent flyer miles, book a flight to anywhere and watch this Moviegoer soar. The DV-L70U is ideal for long airline flights, since you can play both DVDs and music CDs--for free! It's also a great pacifier for anxious kids on highway journeys.

About the size of two DVD cases stacked on top of one another, the DV-L70U Moviegoer weighs just over two pounds with the supplied lithium battery pack, making it lighter than competing models. With a 7-inch diagonal, 16:9 aspect-ratio screen, the Moviegoer also offers one of the largest portable DVD pictures currently available.

The L70U's liquid crystal display is extremely impressive; it offers good brightness and contrast levels (even in high-ambient light) and we found absolutely no anomalies such as dead pixels. The DV-L70U exhibited a minimal amount of hotspotting--a common problem with LCD technology, where the lower-middle portion of the screen appears washed out. Although some grays appear slightly blue, colors remain faithful overall; flesh tones and outdoor scenes look natural instead of pink and neon green. In fact, the Moviegoer's vivid images seem to expand the 7-inch diagonal screen size instead of diminishing it.

The rechargeable lithium battery pack snaps into place and connects to the player via a short, pin-connector cable. An onscreen icon flashes when the battery is low. Sharp estimates the battery will last for up to three hours before it needs recharging. With the supplied AC adapter, you can recharge the unit in about five hours. The AC adapter allows you to play movies on the DV-L70U, which is useful if you want to watch DVDs in a hotel room. You can also connect the DV-L70U to a TV monitor and use it as a standalone DVD player.

Sharp supplies all the necessary audio-video (AV) cables, except the digital-audio optical link that's necessary to connect the DV-L70U to an outboard processor with DTS or Dolby Digital decoding. You can use the AV jacks for outputting and inputting audio-video signals. This enables you to use the LCD screen as a monitor to display images from a camcorder--or even a VCR.

The layout of the DV-L70U's features is very intuitive; its basic functions--play, stop, skip, and arrow buttons for navigating DVD menus--reside on top of the panel to the right of the disc-loading well. You can access additional functions, such as zoom, virtual sound, subtitle on/off, as well as disc programming features, from the supplied remote control. You can also get to basic features from an onscreen graphical user interface (GUI), but we found the GUI to be more cumbersome than the remote or panel buttons.

Our only other minor complaint concerns the Moviegoer's aesthetics. Although the faux brushed-aluminum design is very appealing, it reflects light back onto the LCD screen, particularly in the dark, which diminishes picture quality. We'd prefer a flat-black coating on the inside of the player.

Soundwise, the dual front speakers below the screen are merely adequate. However, since portable DVD players lend themselves to solitary viewing, most users will use headphones. We recommend that you purchase a high-quality set. We also strongly recommend that you purchase a carrying case, given the cost and delicacy of the liquid crystal display.

With an excellent set of headphones, a comfortable seat, and low ambient light, you may find yourself glued to the beautiful 7-inch LCD screen of Sharp's DV-L70U Moviegoer DVD player. --Eric Gill

Pros:

• Very impressive picture quality
• Extremely compact and lightweight
• Automatic anti-skip buffer
• Doubles as a stand-alone DVD player

Cons:

• Brushed-aluminum design reflects light onto screen
• Mediocre sound quality from built-in speakers

From the manufacturer

The DV-L70U's unique features and stylish, lightweight design combined with the widespread availability of DVD titles makes this an ideal entertainment choice for consumers, movie buffs, families and even business travelers. The DV-L70U raises the bar for portable DVD players by delivering home theater quality features housed in a sleek, compact design.

The portable DV-L70U measures just 7.41 inches wide by 5.56 inches high by 2 inches deep (only slightly larger than a paperback book), and weighs less than two pounds without the battery. This lightweight design, combined with an easy-to-use graphical user interface, enables consumers to experience high quality entertainment virtually everywhere - from home to the office to the car, to the beach or even camping.

The DV-L70U also boasts an incredible 3.5 hour battery life, DVD/CD/Video CD compatibility, easy-to-use function controls and an ultra-thin, unified remote control.

Equipped with a full array of AV outputs and inputs, the DV-L70U acts as a portable home theater. The unit enables system building with other devices that have S-video input or composite video input, supplying top quality DVD images and sound to televisions or monitors.

The unit's superior image quality is the result of Sharp's proprietary Digital Gamma Correction playback circuit, which corrects color values in dim sections of the picture according to the brightness of the video image. In addition, the DV-L70U uses Digital Super Picture Logic to provide even greater sharpness by adjusting brightness/contrast and clarifying outlines and picture details, while reducing signal "noise."

Additionally, the DV-L70U uses a thin-profile, seven-inch LCD panel that uses a low-reflectivity black matrix and AGLR (Anti-Glare Low-Reflection) polarizer to reduce reflection of ambient light and provide dramatic video images that defy its compact size.

With Virtual Dolby Surround sound (Q Surround), and Digital Theater Sound (DTS) compatibility, the DV-L70U provides an impressive listening experience when connected to a full-size system or just headphones. Equipped with a built-in optical digital audio output jack, the DV-L70U easily lets consumers match the system environment of an existing audio system for optimum performance.

For outstanding video, the DV-L70U incorporates a 10-bit D/A converter that processes eight-bit digital DVD data with four time's greater accuracy, resulting in playback of high-resolution video images with clarity and crystal clear resolution.

Additional DV-L70U features include two power sources, including normal household AC power and a rechargeable lithium-ion battery (included), and parental control to enable monitoring of children's viewing.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

320 of 326 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A very impressive piece of technology, January 26, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Sharp DV-L70U 7" Portable DVD Player (Electronics)

The portable DVD player is a marvel of technology, and the Sharp Moviegoer is an excellent example of the genre. Although it is very much a luxury, it's something that any movie-lover or fan of gadgets would love. At the moment there seem to be three main options for portable DVD players, and I considered them all before deciding on the Sharp. They are: the Panasonic Palm Theater, the Pioneer LC-10 and the Sharp DV-L70U Moviegoer.

The Panasonic is the most popular, easiest to find and also the cheapest (especially given recent price reductions). It is also a nice size, but the trade-off is that you only get a 5" screen, which is a bit on the small size. I was able to try it out at a local electronics store, but wasn't that impressed with its performance when using non-anamorphic discs (those not enhanced for widescreen TVs). I found that "zooming" the image to fill the screen resulted in too much pixelation, and stretching it also resulted in some noticeable distortion. Given the large number of non-anamorphic discs out there, I found that unacceptable.

The Pioneer has a 7" screen and is at a similar price, but from what I have heard, it is somewhat large and heavy with the battery. Thus, I decided on the Sharp. I am quite pleased with my decision, with a few minor exceptions.

First of all, I am very happy that I decided to go for the bigger screen. Although the 2" difference between the 5" screen of the Panasonic and the 7" screen on the Sharp may not sound like much, it really does make a difference. The screen seems almost twice as big to me. It is a very good quality screen (and Sharp is famous for their LCDs). The colors are vibrant and bright and I found no "dead" pixels or other imperfections, although it did seem slightly brighter towards the bottom. There are several controls that you can use to adjust the color, brightness and tint of the LCD as well.

I was also pleasantly surprised at how well the unit handles non-anamorphic movies. I didn't find a big difference in picture quality with these discs. There are several options for viewing non-widescreen enhanced movies. You can display them with no modification at all (showing black bars to either side of the screen), you can stretch the image with the "stretch" and "smart stretch" options (which distort the image a little by stretching it horizontally to fill the screen, but don't really result in a loss of picture quality) or you can "zoom" them, which means that you digitally resize the picture to fit the screen. This last option resulted in the same sort of pixelation I noticed on the Panasonic, although it was slightly less noticeable. One last option that may not be immediately obvious is using the image zoom option. This allows you to zoom in on one portion of the screen (and there are three different levels of magnification). This is fun to play with, since you can see small details with surprisingly little pixelation. But I also found that using the lowest level of magnification zoomed the image on 1.85:1 letterboxed discs just enough to fill the screen. This resulted in almost no pixelation (as opposed to the "zoom" viewing option I mentioned above) and you only lose a small portion of the image on the sides. In any case, there are plenty of options to play with -- which one you choose is largely a matter of personal preference.

The unit itself is good looking, with a high-tech brushed aluminum look. It is impressively thin and light without the battery. With the battery it does become a bit more bulky (about the same size as three DVD cases stacked), but is still relatively light. My only complaint about the esthetics of the player is that the battery connects to the unit with an external cord. You can see this in the images that are available on this site, but I didn't really notice it until the player was here in front of me. I found this to be a somewhat inelegant solution, and it stands out a bit when compared with the otherwise excellent design of the player. One other small complaint is that despite the large number of buttons on the unit, there are several features that are only accessible via the remote (the most important being forward/reverse search, slow motion and zoom). The remote itself is also fairly large, which does limit its portability a bit.

Battery life actually seems slightly surpass Sharp's claims of 3 hours -- you should easily be able to finish any movie with plenty of time to spare. The recharge time for the battery is a bit long (5 hours) and the battery also doesn't charge when you are using the player.

A few random features that I liked: optical digital output so I can record mindiscs digitally; the ability to use the LCD to monitor an outside source like a TV signal, a camcorder or video game; adjustable backlight that you can also turn off when connected to a separate TV; the unit will also output DTS and Dolby Digital signals to your audio equipment.

Despite a few minor flaws, I think the Sharp is the best overall player on the market, and anyone looking for a portable player should give it a close look.

61 of 62 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sharp Portable DVD Player, DV-L70U, April 22, 2000

By 

Drizzt DoUrden (Moorestown, NJ) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sharp DV-L70U 7" Portable DVD Player (Electronics)

Awesome player for the gadget minded. I've also tried the Pioneer PDV-LC10; it too has a 7" screen. Both are great machines, but the Sharp has better picture resolution. The buttons and button layout are definitely not very well thought out on the Sharp though. There are a few basic functions and a button for a Graphical User Interface (not too useful), but most of the common functions you will uses are on the remote (a fast fwd on the unit should have been mandatory), which is the size of most common TV remotes (not too portable). I liked the slim Pioneer remote much better. If I can find a universal remote as slim as the Pioneer's remote, I am ditching the Sharp remote. The great thing about the Sharp (other than its image resolution) is the batter. The battery attaches directly under the unit and only adds about 1.5 cm to the height of the unit and absolutely none to the depth or width of the unit. The Pioneer battery pack adds about double that and seems much heavier. Without the battery pack though, the unit is an incredible 2.75 cm thick (approx. measurements). I still give this unit 5 stars though. As a portable unit, you want to see your DVD movies with the best quality possible. With its 7-inch TFT LCD screen with approximately 337,000 pixels, Sharp delivers in spades. Its sound is also decent through the built in speakers, but use a good pair of headphones and you won't miss your home theater. On an airplane, just watch heads turn when you pop in your favorite movie and enjoy. If you have the bucks. This is definitely worth looking at.

39 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars AWESOME!, August 16, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Sharp DV-L70U 7" Portable DVD Player (Electronics)

I recently picked up this product at Sam's Wholesale Club on a closeout sale (they weren't selling to well). I picked it up for the ridiculously low sum of $640! Well, after salivating over the product for months and not wanting to drop over a thousand bucks on a decent one, I was pumped! I tried it out immediately and was amazed at how well it displayed movies. You can take it anywhere and it I have found the battery life to be over Sharp's claims. I got about 3.5 hours out of it. The screen is much better than the screens on competing models (ie: Panasonic, Sony, Pioneer), believe me, I've checked them all out! It hooks up really easy to a TV too. My favorite feature is it's size, or lack there of. I can pack it and a ton of movies in a space slightly larger than that of a CD player and CD's in a case. Oh, you can also use it to play CD's. I use mine for both and personally think the sound is better than my CD player. The sound is another great feature as its speakers are awesome in their quality. But, if you really want surround sound, pick up a good set of headphones. In closing, this product is a must have for travelers with extra dough to drop as it performs multiple roles (home DVD player, CD player, portable DVD player). Just think of it this way: wouldn't it be nice if you had something like this on a long flight? You could just sit back and watch everyone else around you turn green with envy! So, do yourself a favor and buy this unit!