Koss KD260-2 DVD set top player

I've only had a preliminary chance to look at the Koss KD260-2 DVD player I bought at Costco for $129.99 CDN. Anyway, I spotted several minor flaws that would make me think twice about buying it as follows:

Likes:

• Seems to cover full raster width.
• High resolution seems good out to 500 lines of horizontal resolution.
• Hue (tint) is bang on.
• Has audio dynamic range control.
• Will play DVD-RWs.
• Has composite, Y/C & component output connections.
• Did play DVD-Rs that had slight authoring problems which would cause most other players to not play.

Dislikes:

• The brightness level in the whites is 5% too high (100 IRE is 105 IRE).
• Wouldn't play or load slightly defective test DVD-Rs that other players will load & play.
• It cuts off all black details below the 7.5% pedestal level (detail exists below this level on some NTSC DVD discs).
• While it does have PAL or NTSC video output, it does not convert between them.
• There appears to be no way to menu from the front panel, so if you've lost the remote, your sunk.
• It does not come with a Y/C cable.
• There are bright green lines in the bottom 2 or 3 lines of raster, however most TVs wouldn't notice this because edge of raster is usually cropped.
• Anamorphic was set to off (should have defaulted on to 4X3 standard, not 4X3 letterbox).
• Color saturation is very slightly oversaturated using a calibration DVD & a vectorscope.

By Doug Hembruff.