H & B DVD 5415S

Your position paeprs appear to be thoughtful. However, I see little to no concern for the students in Bellevue schools who are not college bound, and who are struggling with academics, language, culture and lack of family support and are being labeled failures long before high school. We have an enormous gang problem in parts of Bellevue. These are dis-enfranchised students that the school district and the community are ignoring and failing to serve. To be assured a strong economic future, these students need to be supported in preparation for vocational/technical training beyond high school. For many of them college is not the answer. Apprenticeships, trades training, vocational institutes are the post secondary door to success. Bellevue is failing these students long before they become a drop-out statistic. Our drop out rate, when adequately measured and admitted to, is an embarrassment to all of us!

I bought this H & B DVD 5415S DVD Player about a year ago from Amazon. I have had no problems with it at all, it was really easy to set-up, just plug and play really - especially for a novice user like me, who doesn't understand all the technical stuff.

I have had my H & B DVD 5415S DVD player for about 18 months now. It has never had heavy use with probably no more than 2 films watched each week for the first 8 or 9 months.

The display has always been temperamental, it freezes with some discs during playback or whilst choosing from the menu and the drawer broke for absolutely no reason just before the 12 month guarantee ran out. It was fixed under the guarantee but has continued to freeze - particularly with the LOTR Extended 2nd disc and also the Two Towers Extended 2nd disc. They both played fine at first but now we can't watch either which is really frustrating when I can't afford to replace the machine.

It was a choice between the H&B DVD-5415 S or the Yelo 800 DVD players. The H&B has 110/240V 60/50Hz power input which is important to me and so won the day. At £129.99 from DVD Players, it was with me the next day.

I'd been put off DVD players by tales of poor music reproduction in the HiFi press. I find this a warmer sound than my previous TEAC PD-445 CD player.

Installation was as simple as it could possibly be - plug & play. The manual is not the best I've seen, but most of the options are intuitive anyway. I'm using the audio outputs but it has surround facilities too.

The case is beautifully slim and does my cabinet proud. The display is naturally rather limited and slightly difficult to read at my normal sitting distance.

Picture quality is as good as I expected it to be, though I don't have a lot to compare it to.

My only gripes are that the subtitles appear when I pause a movie and then resume (requiring a couple of presses of the subtitle button to be rid of them), and the need to be more accurate than I'm used to when pointing the remote - the field of reception is quite narrow and I often have to re-aim before getting the response I want.

I'd recommend this machine, but it's only one of many at this price.