Sumvision Phoenix Premium HDMI DVD/DivX Player Review

Overall Rating

Compact, approx (W) 22.5cm (D) 26cm ( H) 5cm. Excellent value for money for it's price, circa £30.00 at July 2008. Supports many formats including USB devices.

Setup was a nightmare. Badly translated inadequate manual. Useless website. Display is a rather boring orange LED displaying the word "OFF" when not in use. Flimsy CD/DVD tray. Remote buttons stick up a lot and have a lot of travel but otherwise ok.

We have a 32inch Samsung HD ready LCD TV that is about two years old. This DVD upscales the picture from ordinary DVDs to the best picture quality that your television can support, so you should notice an improvement in the picture quality compared to a standard DVD player. Note that you MUST use an HDMI cable to benefit from this upscaling. I've seen reviews where people are connected by scart lead and say they can see the difference, if this is the case it's NOT because the picture has been upscaled. We followed the setup instructions in the quite frankly useless instruction manual, The website http://www.sumvision.com.cn is even more useless as it does not even have the manual on the site. We also had our Samsung's menu to deal with. In theory with an HDMI connection you don't need any other connection between your TV and the Sumvision as the HDMI cable carries sound and vision. There is no HDMI lead in the box (well this is tremendously good value already) but there is a scart lead and phone jacks for sound and video, I plugged in the phono jacks AND the HMDI cable. I also used a digital coaxial cable to connect the box to our 5.1 surround sound system which works perfectly). There is also an optical sound connection but mine is already in use by my SKY box.

Everything worked fine straightaway but I was doubtful if any upscaling was going on. I then unplugged the phono jacks and totally lost the picture, the HDMI cable wasn't in use at all! Our Samsung kept telling us there was no HDMI signal. Having tried every combination in the settings with no joy, I reverted to connecting the Sumvision to our brand new smaller Cyberdene HD ready TV. This too initially didn't appear to work so I tried another HDMI cable and still nothing. By sheer fluke at some point the TV flashed up something like 572p, which indicated an upscaled picture, and it was a VERY sharp picture. However I couldn't get this back with sound so I switched the Sumvision on and off.

Miracles!! The Sumvsion HD picture and sound appeared all on their own without any intervention at all. I repeated this a few times and it was consistent. It let me upscale to 1080i but without sound, I believe this is beyond the specification of this £199 TV/DVD machine so I was happy enough with the noticeable improvement I had already seen.

Anyway, back to the Samsung. I tried the same thing again, i.e. the Sumvision connected to the TV with only the HDMI cable. The TV was happily showing SKY TV when I turned on the DVD, Bingo!! An upscaled DVD picture. This is reminiscent of Scart leads and the pin 8 feature whereby the connected box sends a signal to the TV saying "Hello, I'm Here!!" so the TV switches itself over automatically.

I haven't had time to try the many formats that this box supports, including USB devices like memory sticks and external USB hard drives but I have read many reviews which just concentrate on those features and it seems to be very capable. One thing to note is that many eBay sellers sell it as DivX compatible but according to one reviewer it isn't. The manual is so poor that the only reference to the front mounted USB port is in a diagram telling you what it is, not how to use it! See reviews/forums for help on this but I know that the "goto" button is used. The manufacturer only claims the following formats, but bear in mind they haven't even written a proper manual for such a complicated and capable machine so it might be even more capable than they claim.

DVD, DVD+/-R, DVD+/-RW, CD R, CD RW, CD Audio/Video, MPEG4, MP3, JPEG, Xvid

I have also read and seen reviews/websites where "B" grade boxes are available, ie previously opened and returned as dead to the supplier. Given my introduction to this machine I can hardly say I'm surprised.

You might want to consider the Philips DVDR3480 DVD Player Recorder. They are more expensive than the Sumvision. I spotted a new one go for £42 on eBay but that is unusual. This is a Recorder too from a far better known manufacturer with a proper website with a downloadable manual etc. It is also officially DivX Ultra certified. For those of you who have no idea what this is, it is a popular format for video downloads. DivX can allegedly compress an ordinary DVD onto a CD. I wish I'd bought one of these, size isn't everything as they say!