The nice thing about Apex players though is that when they do fail it's
usually a simple matter to repair them.
Not always.
I've dealt with repairs on these cheapie DVD players.
One was a simple repair: replace a shorted bridge diode and the fuse in the
power supply.
Another wasn't so simple: worn optical pickup in the DVS branded IDE drive.
Replaced the whole drive with a LiteOn computer IDE DVD-ROM drive, but had to
figure out a way to mount it in place.
Of course, I'm seeing more of these cheap DVD players and TV/DVD combo units
use these DVS drives. From what I've seen so far, they typically last about 1
year, 2 years if you're lucky.
And quite a few have problems that are simply not worth the trouble to repair.
A Norcent that went brain dead for no reason at all. All it does is glow the
green power LED on the front, but does nothing else. A write-off as "not
recommended for repair" as these things can be bought cheaper than paying for a
repair (if you can even find non-standard parts to do the repair to begin
with.)
And the biggest problem is with picture quality. Now, on first glance, they
look okay. But, the warts show up when you start to measure them. Most have a
horrid high frequency roll-off on the video, usually in several decibels which
progress further downward the higher you go in the curve, which results in a
softer looking video, especially with a lot of fine details. Sometimes, the
IRE is either too hot or too cold and usually never dead on, resulting in
rather poor contrast. Finally, progressive scan cheapies don't do the job of
deinterlacing very well, especially with 3:2 pulled video from telecine
transfers of 24 FPS film. Some cheapie models even have a bigger tendency to
introduce macroblocking noise in the video than most brand name DVD players.
Sorry, but I prefer a good balance on reliability and performance, which means
you have to spend a little more on a name brand that will likely have a decent
drive, a decent power supply, a decent decoder, a decent deinterlacer, a decent
analogue section, and decent parts which make the whole works tick. - Reinhart
