Cyberhome CH-DVD 300 DVD Player

When we moved to the US 3 years ago, we had to furnish our rental pretty quickly. As we were only supposed to be here for a year, everything had to be cheap and we didn't bother shipping much of our stuff from the UK. Besides, most of our electronics would have needed expensive transformers for them to work! So we didn't ship any of our VHS tapes (no players play PAL over here) and we needed a multi-region player for our DVDs, something to play region 2 without a problem.

I did the minimum amount of research. Many of the Japanese players needed codes and fiddling with. However, while we were in Best Buy, buying our TV, I asked the nice lads if they sold a multi-region DVD player. They looked at me as if I was talking another language and then asked the manager. He said they only sold one and it was the Cyberhome.

Anyway, I eventually ordered it from Amazon (with a reconditioned Dyson and a Panasonic breadmaker!) for $45. It played everything I threw at it. All the region 2s and DVD-Rs.

It is used every single day in my house for two or three hours at a time. It has been taken apart on four occasions due to my then 18 month old trying to play two DVDs at a time. It plays really scratched kids DVDs without much of a murmur, though it does object to too many greasy fingermarks. It gets a bit jittery with rentals. Either the soundtrack gets ahead of itself or the film gets all start and stoppy. It just needs to be turned off and back on again usually about 2/3 of the way through a film and this fixes the problem immediately.

It is a complete workhorse and I am continually surprised that it is still working, mainly because when I bought it there were loads of Amazon reviews saying that it was a heap of cr@p...

The picture quality is fine as is the sound reproduction. My TV is a huge Sony thing (I miss my Panasonic widescreen from home but they had two widescreens that weren't plasma or LCD available when we bought it and they were horrendously expensive) so has pretty good reproduction in general. The only thing I have noticed is on some of the region 2s, the PAL coding is obvious at the top of the screen (white blocks moving) but this is a minor annoyance. If I had a proper home cinema set up, then maybe I would be annoyed with the unit, but I have three kids who watch Spongebob, Dora and Baby Einstein on it, respectively. It just needs to play the DVDs, with sound and picture matching, without complaining, which it does!

I like it so much that I bought my mum the UK equivalent for her birthday last year after the expensive one I bought her the Christmas before stopped working. Her Cyberhome is still going strong too.

The fact that mine is still working after 3 years is a testament to the fact that a cheap player can be better than its more expensive cousins. Certainly for what I want it for, I could not have done better than the Cyberhome and I am very happy with its continued usage in my home.