funkyfresh electronics
Philips DVP 5990 Review
- Details
- Category: Electronics
- Published: Thursday, 28 May 2009 15:18
One of the questions we get a lot is, “What’s the easiest way to play videos from my computer on my TV?” There are myriad options depending on your level of expertise, quality requirements, budget, and spare time. However, one of the best values and easiest solutions is to simply buy a DVD player with a USB port on the front and a plethora of popular codecs inside. The Philips DVP-5990 is a slim single disc player that plays Divx, MP3s, WMAs, JPEGs, and a variety of undocumented formats. You’re mileage may vary but we found it very good at playing all the popular formats we regularly use on our PC.
Let’s not forget it’s a DVD player first. The DVP-5990 loads DVDs quickly, upscales to HD and provides an excellent picture. The player also includes an HDMI connection for easy setup with your HD TV. The USB 2.0 port is easily accessible on the front and is compatible with high capacity flash drives. We used it with a 16GB microSD card inside a small adapter. The great thing about this approach is it doesn’t stick out far from the player. We can keep the USB microSD adapter plugged in and keep the player neatly tucked away.
The menu for navigating the USB content is a basic folder tree but it works fine. If you keep things nice and organized on your flash drive you’ll have no trouble finding what you want to watch. On the DVD side the DVP5990 gets to the root directory of the DVD quickly and allows for skipping of previews and piracy notices.
The Philips DVP5990 sells for about $60 and is a real bargain considering everything it does. Experiencing the random access of video via the USB port reminds one of the early days of MP3s when CDs started to look really dated. Optical media is dying a slow death that will accelerate as more consumers experience “on demand” media with simple players like this one.
Visit Philips for more information.
