Philips DCP951/37 9-Inch Portable DVD Player with iPod Docking

• 9-inch LCD Color Widescreen Portable DVD Player
• Included iPod Docking port for play and charge
• Doubles as digital photo frame
• Play CD, S(VCD), DVD, DVD+R/RW, DVD-R/RW, MP3, WMA ,JPEG digital camera photos, DivX & MPEG4 movies
• Up to 2.5 hours of playback with built in battery

I picked one of these up. I was psyched about the iPod dock. A great idea and from what I can currently find, also a unique feature. No one else has a portable DVD with an iPod dock. At the time of purchase I was torn between this Philips model and the Sony FX820. I'm a big Sony fan but the iPod dock really had me.

I got it home and popped my iPhone into the slide out dock. After fidgeting with it for a couple of minutes I was watching a movie from my iPhone on the screen. Cool. But.....then I noticed. Unless you are looking at this player's screen head on, you can't see a damned thing. If you change the viewing angle just a bit, the LCD screen becomes nearly black. Unviewable. Very disappointing. To me, this one fault makes this player useless. It's a shame. The iPod dock feature is cool.

The unit does feel VERY plastic-y. Also, this is an open faced design. You can't close it up. The screen is always exposed. The DVD loads on the back of the unit too. Kind of clumsy.

On a positive note. The unit didn't seem affected by any cellphone GSM noise.

A cool idea but flawed by seriously poor image quality. I would recommend the Sony FX820. You can hook up an iPod or just about any external video source using a cable. The Sony is far superior in material, build quality and picture quality. Sorry Philips!

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I have an iPod classic with 80 GB. I carry my music and a lot of movies with me to watch during my commute on a busy subway system. I wanted a bigger screen to watch my iPod movies. This thing has adapters for virtually all formats. I am going to throw out the others but am keeping the iPod classic and touch/iPhone ones. The built in speakers are not very good quality. The headphones produce good iPod sound pass through.

I am a bit disappointed at the SD card format support. The SD card can only have MP3 sound files or JPEG pictures. This thing also supports DivX. I am not sure how this works. I am not interested either. MPG4 movie does not play. I was planning to use this card feature some times.

The DVD is OK type. The DVD door is extremely flimsy. Mine is already showing signs of wear after one week! The battery drains a little faster when running the DVD drive to watch movies. I am planning to take my movies mostly on the iPod.

Flimsy design, poor video image quality, and no battery gauge that is why 3 stars. I am otherwise very happy and would recommend this product.

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Most of the basics have been covered by other reviewers. The very basic stuff you know and expect has been given the proper attention.

However there are a few things about this unit that are just plain wrong or misleading.

-This unit CAN read movies from the memory card slot. DVD's encoded as AVI's can be read. With a smaller screen you'll want to scale down to less than half of the original DVD resolution (320 width on widescreen format), but the files will be recognized by the unit and can be played on it.

-The iPod dock will ONLY act as a conduit for movies that are compatible with the iPod on models that support movies. This means that unless you can load the video into iTunes and watch it on your iPod then it isn't going to work on the DVD player. The unit is simply taking the video stream from the iPod and putting it to the screen. It is NOT decoding the video at all.

-Movies encoded for the iPod and loaded onto a memory card can NOT be read by the unit. It will see the files but it will be read as an incompatible format.

-Movies in AVI format can be burned to a CD or DVD and read in the exact same manner as using a memory card.

-The entire "DivX functionality" is only with DivX versions 4 and 5 for encoding media. As the current DivX release is up to 7, well, you get the idea. The integration of the unit with this name brand is almost exclusively so that they could push customers to buy movies from DivX. Don't think that you need to use the DivX encoder to make video media for this. It's also quite possible that the unit might not read newer movies encoded with version 7 from the Divx site. Consider this a warning to stay away from the notion that DivX is necessary or really much of an option.

The bottom line is that this is quite a good dvd player. The screen has one of the best pictures I've seen and has enough expansion to not have many limitations to it. The iPod integration is nice, but unless you've dedicated a significant amounts of time and energy to moving media onto one, it shouldn't really be seen as a selling point.

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Tried it, didn't like it. It's speakers are not powerful enough. The plastic of the disc door and tray are too flimsy. The curved shape of the case makes it nearly impossible to use the (also flimsy) stand. The unit gets too hot, it would be uncomfortable in your lap. The remote doesn't work more than a few feet from it and then only when you're facing straight to it. All in all, it's a neat idea just not very well executed.

This is a solid system for watching DVDs and iPod videos. Haven't tried the SD card yet, but the quality for DVDs and the iPod is excellent.

The only problem I had was using the controls on the system itself for fast forwarding iPod video. They were pretty clunky. However, if you use the remote control, there is no issue. All in all, it is well worth the money for people who enjoy videos on the go.