Zenith DCK596MC
The Zenith DCK596MC is a DVD & VHS combination player. It sells at Wal-Mart
for about $278. CDN. I don't particularly like combination units because they
tend to skimp on features & they tend to be more expensive than if you bought
separate units. This unit had several major design flaws & I would not recommend
it. Because I found so many problems I gave up on doing a more thorough test.
Likes:
- Does allow DVD details of headroom whites levels between 100-108IRE to be
shown.
- DVD image covers full raster width.
- Has Y/C (S-Video) cable included.
- Batteries are included for remote
- Plays CD-R & CD-RW
- VHS has HI-FI audio & 4 video heads
- Will play MP3 disc with up to 255 songs on the disc.
- Allows DVD to VHS copying as long as the DVD disc is not Macrovision copy
protected.
- MP3s do play in the correct order they were recorded.
-Does play DVD-RWs even though no mention is made of this.
Dislikes:
- Unlike a stand alone VCR, this one has no tuner, so the only way you can
record television shows is if you can feed your TV monitor output to this
unit. A major shortcoming in my view.
- There is no coaxial cable output for VHS.
- Y/C (S-VIDEO) or component out are menu selectable & do not share a
common luma channel, so if you switch to the wrong one you can't see anything
without using the other connector.
- When you switch to component out, for some strange reason the composite
video out drops significantly in colour saturation and the black pedestal
level of 7.5 IRE drops to zero IRE causing the blacks in the picture to get
7.5% darker with a loss of detail in the black. This is a major design defect.
- All black detail content below 7.5 IRE is clipped, a minor design
flaw.
- Plays VCDs from CD-R with Type 2 menu but audio is intermittent.
- DVD white level output is a bit high at 103%
- VHS white level output was quite high at 112 IRE.
- DVD colors are oversaturated.
- Doesn't play PAL DVDs.
- Doesn't play DVD-Rs with slight authoring defects.
- Doesn't play some DVD-Rs properly or at all with slight burning defects,
but not as fussy as some players on Hollywood movies.
- It was possible to crash this DVD player simply by entering the setup menu
while playing a DVD. Reset was accomplished by unpluging.
- The DVD picture dimensions came defaulted to 16:9 rather than 4:3
- The audio dynamic range control only has on and off settings, but does not
have a range control.
- Only shows 14 characters of the MP3 song name.
- There are no DVD menu buttons on the front panel so if you lose the remote
you're sunk.
By Doug Hembruff.
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