Sony DVP-CX985V Multi-disc DVD Player

Lets say you were the first individual on the planet to invent a machine that would hold and play 400 DVD/CD's. Aside from quality sound and playback, what would be the most important feature for an electronic device that stores and plays 400 DVD/CD's or 400 of any media for that matter?

ACCESS TO THE 400 DVD's!!!!

The negatives of this product FAR outweigh the positives. I only wish we had read a review of this product before we purchased it. We purchased this product - anxious to get rid of a ugly black cabinet filled with 300+ cd and jewel cases. We thought the ability to have one machine (small box) hold all of our CD's/DVD's with the ability to categorize and a full function menu to find, assort and play them would be a terrific solution. We were wrong! This product does NOT live up to Sony's reputation of cutting edge technology.

This machine does an awful job at allowing users access to their media. Please understand that the word awful is an understatement. The "Disc Explorer On Screen Management System" as it is called is the heart and soul of the machine. It is what organizes and allows you to "explore" and locate the individual discs from the 400 that you want to play.

There are 2 aspects to the Disc Explorer...
1) Loading your discs
The actual physical aspect of loading the discs is not what I am referring to. This is easy. On many discs (particularly newer dvd's and cd's) Album Name, Titles to songs, other information is encoded on the disc itself. This information is read by your computer (ala what you see in Windows Media Player and the like). Supposedly, this player reads that data and thereby eliminates alot of your work in typing in the name of the Album and Artist themselves.

PLEASE KNOW: this player recognizes no more than 20% of your collection. What this means is that you will have to spend hours (it took me 4 hours to load 180 discs) typing in the information using a keyboard. Yes the machine does have a PS2 jack for your keyboard. This is not a luxury but a necessity. If this device contained a legitimate reader that read at least 90% of each discs information and automatically recorded it to the slot that the disc occupied - it would solve 50% of the major problem of this portion of the Disc Explorer. BE FOREWARNED. You will be doing a lot of typing and entering information in.

2) Finding and playing your discs.

There are 2 particularily annoying problems with finding your discs that stand out more than the rest of the problems with the "On Screen Management".
1. On Screen Menu Display Character Limitation.
2. SLOwwwww Scrolling / Menu Selection.

1. Character Limitation
The on screen menu displays the following (left to right):

Slot Number

*Jacket Picture - small thumbnail picture of the jacket of your media. Trust me... since the player only recognizes 20% of your collection - it recognizes the same amount of jacket pictures. This is a flashy feature that is really unnecessary as how many of us care what the cover looks like. Now if it gave us the inside of the cover (songs etc.) then that would be a good feature.

**Text Information - limited to 15 characters if the system does not recognize your dvd/cd and you have to type it in. Remember that it only recognizes approx. 20% of your collection so most will be typed in and thereby limited. THIS IS THE MOST ABSURD and ridiculously designed feature of this machine. Here is a perfect example. Lets say you have two Harry Potter DVD's. You have Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone. You also have Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

Your $400 DVD player will display your first Harry Potter DVD as:
HARRY POTTER AN

Your second DVD in the Harry Potter collection will display as:
HARRY POTTER AN

Which one is which? Go open the DVD and Eject each DVD so you can tell. Now you understand the MAJOR FLAW of this machine.

Genre/Media Type - ACTION / DVD for example. Fine for sorting.

2. Scrolling through your collection.
The scrolling down 400 discs is painfully slow. It is so slow and frustrating that you will never use the feature. So you ask - how do you select the media you want? Other than physically walking up to the machine and turning the dial (remote is useless) then the best way is to have a cheat sheet that is handwritten. Sound absurd? It is.As a follow up to #3 - if you are like me and like to know the titles of the individual songs (cd's) then you really need to keep the paper cd covers/inserts...which you means you need to purchase some binders to store them. Remember the binder should contain the paper cd inserts in the same order that they are in your unit. Another big pain! Why couldn't Sony have built a machine that would auto pull the song titles from the CD itself?

It is not a good unit to use if you rent DVD's in addition to playing your collection. The unit takes an abnormal amount of time from the moment you press EJECT or OPEN to actually open so that you may insert your DVD. Almost 20 seconds.

TIP: for anyone that has already purchased this unit or will purchase it despite my negative review - Leave slots 1-5 open when you begin adding your collection to the unit. Otherwise, every time you put a rental DVD in - you will have to turn the dial back to 400 or 399 to play the DVD you just inserted. Why? Because it has an AUTO PLAY feature that you cannot turn off.

So you don't think I am totally bashing the machine. It does have some positive features.

Positives:
1. Great sounding DVD-CD Player that plays SACD.
2. Sleek looking with a blue light.
3. Holds 400 CD/DVD's compactly enough.
4. It plays back alot of formats: DVD-RW, DVD+R, CD-R,CDRW, SACD Video Discs ets.
5. In general - the quality of sound and picture is superb. Sony did an excellent job in this category.

What would make this machine worth buying and would be a quick fix for SONY? Easy! Add a network connection to the player so that the player could pull the album/cd/dvd information right from the NET. Secondly, speed up the searching/scrolling by adding more memory.

All in all - DO NOT WASTE YOUR MONEY. Do wait on Sony to make improvements to this machine. They must know these drawbacks and will probably come out with something better.