[Darkstar_surfer]

Hi, I have been given £200 to buy the kids, 6 years and 3 years old, portable DVD players for the car etc. I have been having a look around and found a iLuv i1155 on Play. Is this a good idea or could I do better.

A colleague at work suggested getting a PSP for each of them, a little over budget but I could add a few £'s, but not a lot.

My idea situation would be to have £'s some left to get them something else as well.

P.S. It is for their Christmas.

[deltafx]

Originally Posted by Darkstar_surfer

Hi, I have been given £200 to buy the kids, 6 years and 3 years old, portable DVD players for the car etc. I have been having a look around and found a iLuv i1155 on Play. Is this a good idea or could I do better.

A colleague at work suggested getting a PSP for each of them, a little over budget but I could add a few £'s, but not a lot.

My idea situation would be to have £'s some left to get them something else as well.

P.S. It is for their Christmas.

i have been looking these Xenta 7" Portable DivX/DVD Player - Piano Black - Ebuyer ebuyer have lots more play divx as well usb port .

[Darkstar_surfer]

Reviews on Xenta are hard to come by where as the iLuv appears to score low on the Ipod interface but very high on DVD playback. Since DVD playback is all I want that seems fair. Battery life is also better on the Iluv at 3 hrs compared to 2 hrs.

[mgx]

I'm replying because I just did this exercise over the last couple of weeks. A couple of key issues to look for:

1. Check on the screen display resolution. Many are 480x234 (even if they are 9" display!) however you can get higher res 800x480 units (even at 7"). Get the better quality if you can. Obviously it will cost more. It sounds great to get a 9" unit, but do you want 9" at a low resolution? Some manufacturers make it hard to figure out what their screen resolution is: in that case, I assume the worst.

2. Check on whether there is USB or SD card access. This means you can get a 16GB SDHC and transcode your DVDs to files, so you can fit a LOT more in the player and not need to change discs (probably the battery will last longer as well, since there is no spinning motor) and no need to take a disc pack with you.

3. Check on ability to play to external device. When you are in your holiday location (as we have been in the past), if there is a TV and you can plug the player into the TV and get native PAL resolution out, so it functions like a normal DVD player, that's a real bonus! And this is where the extra movies on the SDHC are useful.

4. Remember you need an in car kit as well. Either it comes with one or you need to buy one, unless you want it to sit on their lap and fall down every now and again. You should also get a carry bag of some sort.

5. Robustness. This is our second portable DVD player, the last broke after much use by a 2 year old. But it was pretty robust I have to say and ultimately broke because power plug took too much of a beating and finally wires dislodged and fried the unit. It was a hitachi and had a removal battery pack: we had lots of problems after a while as the battery pack became loose and would easily fall out. So I prefer fully integrated batteries.

I could spend up to £200 or more, but I decided on a Philips PET744/05. It ticked most of the boxes above: only 7", but 800x480 display; has SDHC card input; comes with a robust car mount (plastic fitting and easy to detach mount); remote control; swivel display (so it can be used in tablet or photo frame form); 6 hour (manufacturer claimed) battery life; region unlockable; looks stylish. Cost, got it for £130ish on Amazon. You can get PET744/12 (same product, but European model) for about same price.

Just arrived yesterday, been eval'ing it today and really happy! Only down side is that for playing movies off SDHC, I found it is pedantic about them being DivX (not XViD for example), but this isn't so bad as I've figured out which media converter I can use to do my bulk conversions prior to our road trip.

I did really want >7" screen size, but couldn't find one that had a high res (>480x234) screen size and was within budget. I liked the Sony units, but they don't allow movies to be played off media cards.

I would have also liked a non-DVD player, i.e. play purely off media cards, but not too many of them yet, and PMP's like Archos/yet are way above budget.

I did like the Nextbase products, e.g. Nextbase 10, but too far above budget.

Hope that helps. Good luck.

[Darkstar_surfer]

Thanks for the very detailed response but the Philips is way above my price break, I need 2 off for less than £200 total, or £100 each. The information is very help and I will keep it in mind when searching.

[Ilikeit]

Hyundai 7" Multi Region Portable DVD/Mpeg 4 player with USB, Card Reader and Carry Case

hope its helpful for you