Cyberhome CH-DVD 300 DVD Player

I got this nifty little DVD player from Radio Shack for under $50 around Christmas time of 2003. I had never heard of Cyberhome, but I was impressed with what they were doing...an inexpensive, highly functional, small footprint DVD player. The two most important decision criteria for me were the size and the cost. The only place we had to put a DVD player in our family room was a 8 inch wide fireplace mantle, so this small unit fit the bill perfectly. It's only about 9 inches deep and takes up very little room. I also wanted it to be cheap, as we don't normally watch movies in this room and I didn't think spending a lot of money would be justified. This seemed to fit the bill for us. The fact that it boasted progressive scan technology, component video output (in addition to svideo and RCA) and the ability to play just about any type of disk (including .JPG and MP3 files on a CD-R) was just gravy for us. The unit also supports PAL in addition to NTSC format. Wow!

The install was painless. Opening the small box revealed a manual, a credit card-sized remote control, and an A/V cable for video and L/R audio. No component or Svideo cables for the better picture options, but that's not unusual. It installed fine, and our test DVD (Nemo, I think) played just fine as well. The sound quality was good, and the image quality was very nice for a unit this inexpensive. In fact, I think the picture compared favorably with our more expensive Sony DVD player on our 32 inch Wega TV, with bold, full colors and clear edges. The controls on the front of the unit are limited, with only on/off, play/stop/pause, scan and index forward/back. There's also no digital display on the front of the unit, but that's ok....this cost me under $50, right?

That's where the love affair ended. Within a week I started to get annoyed with the length of time the player would take to load a disc and access the menus. It also was pretty loud when in use. In fact, one day it had a disk in it but wasn't playing. I head this strange noise all the way from the other room and went to figure out what was going on. The unit was sitting there spinning up the disk and then slowing down...over and over..even though it wasn't playing. Noisy AND confused. Using the remote is a nightmare. Not only are the buttons poorly labeled (are the labels below the button or above them?), but they're tiny, hard to read, and not arranged with any kind of logic whatsoever. I found it VERY difficult to navigate functions using the remote, such as audio/video settings, the display, disk navigation, and others. The manual wasn't much help either. With the unit so small maybe they felt a need to make the remote tiny as well. That was a big (not small) mistake on their part.

I also tried using some of their other features, playing JPG files and MP3 music. In both cases the unit seemed to read the disks just fine, but the results were less than optimal. Viewing the JPG images on the disk was not very intuitive, and I found myself hitting wrong buttons and exiting menus that I had worked so hard to get into. Once I got the slide show started I found even more issues. First, the picture quality was horrible...even with high resolution photographs. They appeared blurry with very little color saturation on the TV. I also found that the slide show would stop in just a few minutes when it was supposed to keep going. I would have to turn the unit off and back on to start the slideshow again. This was very frustrating when you just want to have pictures showing on your TV for the kids to watch. Finally, the sound quality of the MP3 playback was also below par, with the volume levels so low that when the TV was turned up loud enough to hear them you could easily hear static.

Ok..given all these shortcomings, I was still ok with this little unit because 1) it was little, and 2) it was cheap.

Soon, it was dead.

One day it was playing and we could no longer get sound. I tested connections, different disks, settings, and still no sound. The following day the sound was back. The day after that...nothing. The unit decided that it would no longer read disks. The lights would come on, the tray would spin, but there was no recognition of the disks in the tray. After trying various CDs and DVDs to make sure it wasn't a media problem we declared the unit dead.

This took about 5 months, and about 25 or 30 uses.

I boxed it back up, and Radio Shack was kind enough to swap it out with a new one even though I didn't have a receipt. According to the salesman a LOT of those little units had been coming back to them. Not a great vote of confidence. So, now I have a new player still in it's box sitting in my den. I don't think I want to give this one a chance to disappoint me again (fool me once, shame on you..fool me twice...) so I ordered a Philips vertical DVD unit that will fit better anyway.

Overall, While Cyberhome had some great ideas with this little unit, the execution turned out to be quite poor. I would actually be willing to pay more for a unit with this size and features if it would do a better job and hold up longer. Maybe Cyberhome should put some money into improving this nifty little unit that is high on good ideas, but too low on quality for me to recommend it.