Saturday, June 25, 2005
Do you get what you pay for?
As the regular reader may recall, our DVD player packed up a few weeks ago. I was exploring all sorts of options to replace it but then we decided to buy a house. So we're skint. However, I was really missing playing my challenging European art house films. Ok, so I haven't got any challenging art house films, but I have got loads of dumb American action films and I really miss not being able to play them. So as a stop gap, I decided to get a £35 Mico DVD808 from Sainsburys. I expected it to be rubbish but I am astounded how they have packed so much performance into such a cheap package. It even has a Optical Digital output to pump the sound into my surround sound HiFi. I watched The Aviator on it last night and there was no fragmentation, artifacting or dodgy colours. For £35! That's less than the cost of 3 DVD films. My last player cost £970. Me thinks I may have been ripped off last time.
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7 comments:
I'm with you on this one as you'd expect to pay £35 and get rubbish but sounds like you have a little gem. I paid about £500 6+ years ago for my DVD player and it's now giving me grief. Perhaps a trip to supermarket is in order.
Some of these cheaper units even look half decent now. I know the 'experts' would down their noses at players like this but if works well who cares.
I'm surprised your Pioneer packed up so soon, I remember you buying it. My old 525 is still chugging along.
No challanging art films Ports....surely not!?
I bought two Mico DVD players a couple of years ago... they were £80 each, multi-region and had optical digital output. Okay, they were (still are) fairly unattractive (the later Mico units like yours are much better looking), but at £80 you can almost treat them as disposable items. Two weeks before the guarantee ran out, one of them went kaput - Sainsburys replaced it free of charge. They're still going, one of them is a bit noisy and they have trouble playing CDs made by my Ulead photo album software (other DVD players don't). But for £160 and two years service that's not bad. When I do have to replace them, I may well go with the Mico option again. Who cares what the experts think (actually I remember Choddo recommending the old Micos).
By the way, is the DVD808 multi-region (either out of the box or with a hack)?
I see my less-than-attractive model is still on the site.
As far as I know it is region 2 only. I have searched the Interweb for a multi Region hack but found nothing.
DVD-808, DVD-1028
This hack may work on most Mico DVD players.
Multi-Region:
Open drive tray,
Press 2, 8, 1, 2, and then Enter
You should now have the Secret menu up on the screen
Continue to press Enter and you can select the region you want from 1 - 9
Close drive tray door when finished#
Enjoy!
Msrtin.
Genius Martin! That does indeed work on my box. Thanks very much. £35 AND it's multi region. Amazing.
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