Technology

There’s a saying that “technology begets technology”.

I know this because I made it up a minute ago.

I used to have a 21“ 4:3 TV that I bought ex-rental from Rumbelows for £50. Then, six months later, I bought a DVD player from Woolworths for the princely sum of £150 (oh the extravagance). Being a purist, I insisted on watching movies on it in letterbox format rather than 4:3.

It looked rubbish. So I had to go out and buy myself a 28” widescreen set from Matsui (aka Dixons own brand). As I said, technology begets technology.

This lasted me all of nine years before keeling over and dying in January. So I bought myself a replacement – an HD-capable Sony Bravia 26“ LCD tele. This has a really nice picture when dealing with digital sources connected using an HDMI cable (eg my Apple TV, particularly now I’ve set it to 1080i 50Hz rather than 720); it has a reasonably fuzzy/crap picture with analogue sources (ie anything that uses a SCART cable such as a standard DVD player or a Sky box).

My DVD player keeled over and died on Friday: Davina McCall and the T1000 are to blame. I managed to fix it once, through the manly use of screwdrivers and ”shaking it a bit“, but that little Alba DVD player wasn’t coming back from the dead for a second time. Bang goes £17.99 worth of electronics from Sainsbury’s straight into the pink ”small household electrical appliances“ recycling bin at Makro on the Greenwich Peninsula.

We therefore had a few choices

1. Go without a DVD player.
2. Buy an equally cheap DVD player from Sainsbury’s or Argos.
3. Buy a colossally expensive Blu-ray player
4. Buy a colossally expensive HD-DVD player
5. Buy a £50 DVD player with HD-upres capabilities

Which would you have picked?

1. What are you? Amish?
2. A reasonable conclusion that would condemn you to another year of slightly fuzzy DVD playback
3. Interesting call, rich early adopter. They’ll be £100 cheaper in a year and the disks are still nearly £30 each. I can wait
4. Ha ha ha! I’ve got a Betamax I can sell you if you want
5. Correct. Technology begets technology and if you have an HD set, you need a DVD player that can upgrade the DVD picture to HD quality.

So we headed off to Argos and bought ourselves a Philips DVP 5960 and HDMI cable for £7 (see what I meant about Curry’s overpricing?). Here’s our experience so far

Continue reading “Review: Philips DVP 5960”