Shinsonic DVD-8310

This Shinsonic DVD-8310 is full featured DVD set top player which sold at Future Shop for about $149. CDN. in the spring of 2002. It is a good value & I would recommend this unit as long as you set up the brightness/contrast controls as instructed below, however, I don't think Future Shop sells this model any more.

Likes:

• Plays VCDs from CD-Rs properly.
• Plays slightly defective DVD-R burns correctly.
• The optical & coaxial audio out works fine for Dolby & DTS, while allowing analogue stereo out at the same time (nice feature).
• Will play a European PAL DVD on an NTSC monitor (does proper standards conversion).
• Covers full raster width.
• Can play MP3s
• Unit may be software flashable to remove Macrovision & world regional settings.

Dislikes:

• The black level pedestal is set 7.5% too dark at the Japanese position rather than the North American NTSC black level & there is no menu setting to fix this. However, if you reset the brightness to +17 & the contrast to -2 this will correct for this serious design flaw.
• The unit can lock up or freeze if it plays a disc with any file in the main root (such as hybrid discs with an autorun file), so you have to unplug unit from the wall & when you plug it back in, quickly push the eject button to remove the disc before it locks up again.
• The Y/C & component out signals do not share a common luma out channel, so if you switch it to the other one, you don't even get a black & white signal.
• Doesn't come with a Y/C cable
• Colour saturation was a wee bit high.
• 1 year parts, but only 90 days labour on warranty.

By Doug Hembruff.