Customer Reviews

Sony DVP-NS55P/S Single Disc DVD Player, Silver

5 star:		(37)
4 star:		(18)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

Although I have had this player a short time, it has played every DVD I have put in it including my wifes Thai DVDs. The Panasonic combo DVD/VCR player that this Sony replaced would not play any of my wifes DVDs and on occasion would not read some of mine until I reinserted the DVD. (to be fair to Panasonic, the VCR section of the player worked fine and the sound and picture were both good). Getting back to the Sony player, the sound and picture quality is great and seems to be an excellent match for my 36" Sony TV.

I use Netflix, so the DVDs I watch are frequently scratched. My old DVD player would frequently skip or stop being able to read the DVDs. I tried cleaning the DVD player's reading head with a cleaning DVD disk. No help. It became very stressful for my wife and I to watch any movie, living in fear that half way through the movie, the DVD player would stop being able to read the DVD. So we bought the Sony DVPNS55P/S based on other reviews. The Sony has played everything we've put in it flawlessly. We're very pleased.

I have had an extremely poor track record in producing DVDs that play consistently well over a wide range of DVD players owned by me, friends and family. Whether I make the DVDs on a personal video recorder (PVR) off the air, or on a computer using two differnet brand DVD writers, the results have always been spotty. I have tried many different brands of media, different recording speeds and both DVD-R and DVD+R disks. The DVDs usually play fine on the PVR and on the computer drives, but not on consumer DVD players. I assume this is because most consumer DVD players are geared more for commercial DVDs and are not engineered to be as capable of reading home-made DVDs.

The Sony DVPNS55P/S stands out from the crowd in a big way! It plays virtually all commercial and home-made DVDs that I have tried on it. I liked it so much, I bought a second one for my girlfriend who complained about how incompetent I was at burning DVDs. This one works works as well as my first one, and she is very pleased with it. Now, I plan to buy a third one for my father.

Apart from playing any type of DVD, the one feature I like the most is the track position memory that remembers where you left off playing the most recent six DVDs and allows you to resume from that last point. This is a HUGE plus for my 88 year old father who has troubles with the small buttons on all remotes and wants the DVD player to work like a VCR player. This feature will allow him to simply turn the unit on and off without having to search for the last play point.

Another amazing feature is the fast foward mode that uses a DSP algorithm to deliver sound at the same pitch (frequency) but faster pace. I don't use this much, but it is impressive.

The only downside was mentioned earlier - when zooming, the magnifying lens symbol stays on the display and cannot be disabled. I've gotten used to that as a minor inconvenience that is more than made up for by the solid performance and outstanding features.

This is a great basic DVD player for someone who isn't ready for or just doesn't want to dish out the cash for the new HDMI or Blue Ray models, and this DVP is also well-suited for HDTVs.

I just bought this player a month ago, so I can't really comment on reliability, but Sony does have a good reputation - only 4% between 2001 and 2005 have needed to be repaired or had serious malfunctioning probs according to Consumer Reports, and Sony has the best reliability rating - tied only with Panasonic and Sanyo. (I'm a nerd and usually reasearch electronics before buying)

It Has great features like zoom, replay, slow/fast play with sound, etc. and is extremely easy to set up and operate. It has great picture & sound quality and comes equipped with Sony's "precision drive 3 system" to compensate for damaged & warped disks. I really like how the player will remember where you left off on up to 6 DVDs, so no more having to fast forward through a scene to find where you left off. Also supports 5-channel surround sound and Dolby Digital sound. After doing lots of research I found that it got great reviews from epinions, Consumer Reports, Cnet, etc.

I watch alot of rented (Netflix) and burned DVDs and it plays almost everything I throw at it. Only two probs to date: One rental skipped during one section, where as it played fine on my laptop. And a "heads up display" on one of my work out DVDs does not show up with this Sony, even though it did on my old cheepo Polaroid DVP.

PROS: Easy to setup and use, lots of functions on the remote, slim design, plays burned, MP3 & JPEG discs, remembers where you left off on up to 6 DVDs, well-suited for HDTVs, precision drive scan, very nice pic & sound quality, low price.

CONS: Slow to load disks. Analog outputs instead of optical digital outputs, no individual 5.1 channel output for surround sound receivers (although none of these are a big deal). Also has minimal disk playing problems.

All in all, a great DVD player for the price!

The Sony DVPNS55P/S Single Disc DVD Player is an excellent unit. The picture quality does look slightly better than my other units. However, most impressive is that this unit plays DVDs with dubious looking scratched surfaces and the like flawlessly. I truly was impressed and I purchased one of these units for that reason. The price is very affordable as well.

I recently bought this product and I have to say I am happy with it. It does it's basic job of playing DVD's/CD's/VCD's which was what I was looking for. Although I haven't played any burnt DVD's yet, I am sure they will be playable by this machine.

Here are the pros for this product:

1) Cheap for the price and performance and features (like hooking up to a receiver and controlling the audio output to the receiver).
2) You can manipulate the sound and picture quality to a good level. I was able to modify the quality of the video so that a VCD with a poorer video quality could play almost like a DVD. Also when I played using different sound outputs from my regular Faltscreen TV I could notice the surround sound difference instead of my regular Stereo sound effect.
3) It has nice controls while playing any type of CD like selecting a Track/Index etc. One of the good feature is A-B play which means you can play only a certain portion of any DVD/VCD/CD again and again which will be very useful if you have kids who are hooked onto a particular song/scene and you want to play them till they are satisfied.
4) Multi-Disc Resume is a nice feature that I found in this product and it can store upto 6 CD/DVD/VCD values when they were removed from the machine. This is very useful when you want to play a certain part from another DVD while watching a movie on another DVD to compare the two. When you put the older DVD back in, it resumes from where you started instead of having to search for it.

Here are the cons of this product:

1) Can play only Region 1 DVD's and as far as I know there are no hacks available to unlock this machine to make it region free.
2) The loading time is annoying as has been noticed by other reviewers as it takes almost 5-10 seconds to load a DVD.
3) There is a loud noise when it switches between tracks particularly on a MP3 CD or a VCD. The Noise is a little loud but that's something I am not really bothered about as long as it works correctly.
4) The Multi-Brand remote is a joke. There is a list of TV's that can be controlled by the remote but unfortunately I have a Sansui TV which is not controllable by this remote. Also, even if it was controllable, it can control only the volume and the power of the TV, nothing else!! I would rather have a universal remote shipped with the device rather than a multi-brand remote.
5) The DivX, Avi files cannot be played by this device and I would have expected that feture to be available since this is a fairly new product (about a year old) and all the DVD players coming out currently do support that feature.

Overall, I think it's a good product with great features for the price and I would recommend to buy it if you are looking for a basic DVD/CD/VCD player in the US.
I will update my review as I continue to use this product.

NOTE: This review is a copy&paste of my review for the previous generation SKU ... Sony DVPNS50P.

DECEMBER 2005: I have only had this item for about three weeks or so. I am hoping that it "holds up" over time, unlike a lot of other DVD players on the market that apparently fail so quickly they are practically disposable in nature.

The "pros" on this item (so far) are:

* sleek, slim, uncluttered look of the unit

* comes in either black or silver, so you can match it up to your other devices.

* easy set up. There's a electrical plug, trip-RCA jacks and an S-video jack. Hook-up is a snap. Hardware-wise, the device, then, is really uncluttered.

* seems to be a good deal for the price.

The "cons" (so far) are:

* as said elsewhere by other reviewers... it IS slow. Slow to boot a disc. Slow to re-start a disc that has been stopped. Just slow.

* the display readout on the front of the box. It scrolls words like "welcome," "open" "close" and "no text." The firmware engineer was apparently out to lunch on this one. There's not even a clock display. It will display the time the DVD has played, thank goodness.

*the on-screen menu is pretty lame. Must have been the same engineer. The menu choices are only displayed as cryptic graphics, and the choices for each graphic are brief and uninformative (as in "on, off, auto" or similar types of statements). You will absolutely have to work through the manual to figure it out. And you won't find a lot of useful functionality after you do. It is a pretty bare-bones box.

* The remote control could use a good bit of improvement. The text is large enough to read ... but the buttons barely protrude from the face. You have to grasp this thing firmly, get your finger right on the button and apply a good bit of pressure to score. And a lot of the buttons can't be pushed while the thing is sitting on the coffee table ... the back of the device is beveled at the top, so if you press on the buttons near the top -- common usage buttons like TV on/off, box on/off and open/close -- while it is sitting on a level surface, the thing just flips up in the air. And the range is horrid. It can't handle getting its signal over the edge of my coffee table three feet away from the box. You've got to pick it up and aim it directly at the device if you want the box to respond. There's no facilitation for using the remote at night (no glow in the dark, backlighting, light-through, etc.) AND the remote came in silver. Who at Sony thought that I would want a silver remote if I bought a black box? Was molding cases for the remote in two different colors too big a challenge for them ... or did it just make it easier for Sony to manage its inventory?

* The box has already told me "no disc" incorrectly a couple of times. Jogging it opened and closed resolved the issue. Either the tray is not designed to align the disc 100% when inserted ... or this is an indication the device is going to have read problems down the road. Time will tell.

Still, IF it is quality, IF it is durable, then it's worth what I paid for it.

UPDATE: September, 2006. After owning one for almost a year ... and buying two more this summer ... I can still recommend this unit. Every once in a great while, it gets confused enough so that I have to unplug it from the wall to "reboot it." It has tracked flawlessly on almost every DVD ... just a freeze here and there on some heavily used Netflix rentals. I do not see any evience of dual-layer freezing. This SKU is out of production, but the current SKU (Sony DVPNS55P)doesn't look much different and so it is probably just as reliable.

A long time ago I bought my first progressive scan DVD player and it was a Sony. For all the hype about how great Sony is, I was a bit disappointed. Sometimes the video quality was brilliant, but a lot of times the picture was grainy. Worst still, there were occasional digital artifacts. Artifacts not present when watching the disc in interlaced format. Ultimately, I started to wonder why even bother watching progressive scan video if it provides more distracting problems that when watching interlaced video? The best example of this occurs when watching my Gladiator DVD. The Sony I used to have would show problems right from the beginning. The text of the prologue would start to flicker noticeably. And other moments in the film show other signs of artifacts, like the first major fight sequence in the colosseum (the Battle of Carthage) in which parts of the stadium would show strange digital spasms (honestly, that's the only way to describe it). Other DVDs that featured, say, window blinds or car front-grills demonstrated similar spasms. Maybe it was just a bad player, but I was not that impressed with progressive scan technology at that point. One thing the Sony did right was read damaged and warp discs. Sony's Precision Drive technology 2 technology is no joke. I even have a DVD of The Mummy Returns that was transferred so badly, none...NONE of my other players I've had were able to read it. The disc is so bad, the players would still say "no disc" on the display. Yet the Sony Precision Drive 2 read the Mummy Returns perfectly! Anyway, I got so frustrated, I ended up buying a Panasonic DVD-S35 and it's progressive scan worked just fine...surviving the Gladiator test with flying colors. After enjoying my Panasonic for a few years, I felt it was time to look for an upgrade. I've been reading about these HDMI DVD players, but unfortuately my Toshiba 42-inch widescreen doesn't support that kind of technology, so I decided to find anything that would provide me with slightly more improved picture and (especially) audio quality. As fine as Panasonic's picture quality is, the audio could be better. I honestly wasn't really looking for another Sony, considering the problems I've had with them in the past (I haven't even mentioned the pre-progressive scan DVD Sony I had that kept freezing up...no doubt the reason why they created their Precision Drive technology). Yet I saw this Sony DVP-NS55P and started to become intrigued. First, they created Precision Drive 3!!! Now, I'm not sure what was wrong with PD2, but if they can improve upon THAT, I'm impressed. But there was reason to believe they may have improved on their progressive scan quality with Precision Cinema Progressive technology, which is supposed to use pixels instead of scan lines to detect movement. I'm not sure EXACTLY what that means but it looks great! Now my old Sony may have had the same technology but either they have improved on that technology (and technology is always improving) or I just had a bad player. It's probably a little bit of both. All I know is the image from the NS55P is gorgeous! Not only did it pass my Gladiator test, but I don't actually notice the same grainy quality. One thing that drives me crazy is which "picture mode" (normal, Dynamic 1, Dynamic 2, Cinema 1 or Cinema 2) to use when watching a film. The manual recommends "one of the Cinema" settings...which makes one wonder why they didn't set one of those as their default. Ultimately, I've chosen Cinema 2 and I'm going to keep it that way. Cinema 2 seems to deliver a satisfying, richly textured picture. One aspect of Sony I've never had a problem with is their audio quality. It's always been top-notch, whether playing Dolby Digital, DTS or your average CD. I WAS a bit surprised to discover no optical digital cable output to connect with my 5.1 receiver...especially since I HAD NO coaxial digital audio cable. So, anxious to use my new DVD player, I had to run out to buy a coax cable! This was a bit annoying as I now have a perfectly good optical cable seeking employment. My question is why? Why did Sony exclude the option of optical digital output when a lot of experts believe it to be superior in sound quality than coax? Apparently, it doesn't matter. Truth is, the sound coming from the Sony and the coaxial cable is the best I've heard through my surround sound system so far! Since I've only recently bought this player, I cannot yet attest to it's durability. I can, however, say that it's great to have an affordable Sony DVD player that actually delivers exceptional progressive scan video to go along with their amazing Precision Drive technology and first-rate audio.

Like other reviewers have said, it plays everything very well.

Mine worked fine for about a week and then stopped playing. The drawer would open & close but it wouldn't play a disc.

Throwing caution to the wind, I disconnected the cords, removed the 5 screws (1 on each side & 3 in the rear) that were holding the top cover in place and took it off.

Lots of room inside - could easily be made 1/2 the width.

Plugged in the unit, opened the drawer, put in a DVD and noticed immediately that it wasn't spinning. Gave it a slight nudge and it took off and began to play the disc.

Put in another disc and again it needed a nudge to get going. Sprayed a bit of silicone grease on the top bearing of the drive and it's been playing fine ever since.

Thought I would share this with you all, in case yours also becomes sluggish.

I bought this DVD player to help me make the most out of my DVD recorder. This unit will play my unfinalized -RW(vr) DVD's that I created on my Sony RDR-GX330.

I also like the Picture/Nav feature when dealing with homemade DVD's with no menu. This will show thumbnails of all the chapters contained on the disk.

I use this primarily to play my -RW(VR) DVD's back to my DVD recorder so that I can make them into a more universally compatible mode.