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17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great Little Unit!, March 29, 2004
My wife and I had been thinking about buying a DVD player for home use. We do some traveling year-round and go camping in the summer, so it seemed like a good idea to get a portable DVD player, but we thought they were very expensive. We chose the D1710 for its portability, appearance, features and mostly its price range. At $200. or less, we weren't expecting much. Smaller 4.5"-screen players were only $30. to $50. cheaper.The D1710 reads DVD's, CD-ROM's, MP3's, JPEG's, TIFF's, and possibly other types of disks/files. It has audio/video and coaxial outputs so you can watch movies on your regular TV, and it comes with a credit card-sized remote control, which works well. The screen is as clear as other players we saw on display costing twice as much, and the sound is typical for such small players with little speakers; it sounds good, but tiny. When using headphones or plugging into a TV or home stereo system the sound is crystal clear and as powerful as a home-based player. So far we've watched about 10 or 12 movies on the D1710, and although it's tracking is decent, it's not flawless. We haven't played a single DVD yet that didn't momentarily skip or hang at least once or twice during the movie. An occasional black screen happens, but each time we waited and the movie picks right back up within maybe 5 to 15 seconds. To be fair, most of the movies we watched have been on cheap DVD's, and judging from reviews of more expensive units this seems to be quite common among portables. The battery, though we've only used it once so far just to test it, lasted exactly 2.5 hours on the first charge. I understand the life increases after a handful of charges. Lastly, we couldn't get JPEG's to show, and the manual is all but useless. I looked up the Audiovox website, which wasn't much more help. You have to create a user-account and then send off some text (no email address for help!), and someone will get back to you within 2 business days. They did, and directed me to call a toll-free number. It turns out that in order for the D1710 to read JPEG's, you need to record them onto disk using CD burning software as opposed to using the "drag and drop" CD feature in Windows XP. After that, it works fine. Overall, this is a great player for $200.
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