Last week I picked up a new DVD player, the RJ-Tech RJ-1800DVXII. It has a ton of features, check it out in the extended entry for this post.

My first impressions weren't too good though. When I brought it home and plugged it in, I tried to eject the tray so I could load a DVD and nothing happened. I was faced with the prospect of bringing the damn thing back to the store or opening it up and trying to fix the problem myself, thereby invalidating my warranty. I, of course, opened it up and found the problem was pretty simple - the laser mechanism is supposed to drop out of the way when ejecting the tray. It wasn't, so the tray couldn't move at all. I simply pushed down on the tray and heard a "whirrr" as the assembly swung out of the way and the tray popped out. I tested it about ten times to make sure it was working and everything was fine, so I slapped her back together and hooked her up.

Then I put the supplied batteries in the remote and it didn't work. Eek! This was easily solved, fresh batteries worked fine. Kinda stupid, supplying dead batteries with your product.

Otherwise, I'm pretty happy with the unit. It plays almost all the movies I tested it with, the only one it hasn't played is an AVI file I recorded with my Canon camera. No biggie, I can just re-encode it if I have to. It does read directly from my camera's Compact Flash memory card, although one of the pictures didn't display properly. It appeared all corrupted for some reason.

When you load a CD-R with media files on it, you get a display with different sections for video, audio and pictures. The display is pretty cramped, you can't see the full file names because there isn't enough room. Even worse, they only display DOS 8.3 names, not the Windows long filenames. You also don't get access to the MP3's tag info. Pretty bogus. Also, if your listening to an mp3 and go into a menu, the music stops playing. They really should let you listen to music while you look at pictures in another folder. Also, it would be nice to have some kind of screen saver on when listening to music, or something like Milkdrop from Winamp. Having that static menu on display while listening to music probably wouldn't be good if you had a plasma TV.

I did have a problem playing back one DVD - the Hulk. It began stuttering badly towards the end of the movie. If you purchase this unit, I would definitely hang on to my old player as backup for the odd movie this thing can't handle. I also had problems with a PAL movie, not sure if this was because it had problems converting it from PAL or some other reason. I haven't tested it with Divx movie subtitles yet, I'll have to give that a shot today. Couldn't get the Karaoke function to work, might have been a wonky mic I was trying it with though. The picture quality seems a bit washed out compared to my old Sony player. The remote is pretty ugly, square shaped with sharp corners and super tiny buttons.

Despite all my complaints, I am still pretty happy wth the unit. It just has a lot of room for improvement. And I can't wait to try and hook up an external hard drive via the USB port on the back, that should be pretty damn cool! I might try out the VGA out with an old monitor I have lying around to see how that works.

Update: It looks like it reads .srt files but not .sub files as far as subtitles go. Damn! I'll have to see if I can convert sub→srt.