Yamada DVX-6100 DivX

Yamada DVX-6100 DivX - Go and get one, don't think about it, they'll stop making it soon and the new version is very flimsy by comparison! It's got 5.1 audio out on phono plugs at the back, so buy a £60 5.1 surround system for a PC plus a bag of phono plugs and wire yourself up for action without spending £300 on a commercial surround sound system!

One of my best purchases of 2003. When I first got this Yamada DVX-6100 DivX dvd player I did have trouble getting some of my DIVX & XVID movies to play, but with each release of a new firmware, this player gets better. The latest version of this firmware is from December which I upgraded to last week and it now plays everything I throw at it! Even though the menu still only shows 11 characters, you can now press the DISPLAY button to show MP3 ID information.

This is a highly recommended play for movie lovers!

I've had two Pacific 1002W's which I took back due to continuing judder problems that other people also seem to be getting..

http://www.reviewcentre.com/review30097.html

And so I decided to spend a little extra and get this Yamada DVX-6100 DivX and try out all my DivX movies I have. So far I'm very impressed. The layer change pause either never happens or is very very quick, it's only skipped a frame in a movie once, the remote is great, it appears well built apart from the scart socket on the back which has been put in at an angle and seems a tad loose. It has 5.1 analogue out, as well as stereo analogue out, coxial and optical digital out and composite and S-Video out with RGB (component) out via the Scart socket.

The menu isn't the best but seems to be a pretty standard one used on most no name brand DVD players at the moment.

So far I've tried about 8 DivX movies, all downloaded from the net and all at varying compression and resolution and it's played them all. I thought the quality might be better than my PC as it has a dedicated MPEG4 chip but it isn't, it's about on par. Watching from a distnace though it's fine and one of the movies could easily be mistaken for a DVD. On one DivX movie the sound goes way out of sync with the picture (but plays fine on my PC) so I guess you can't have everything.

I've not checked the firmware version yet but as standard out the box it plays all DivX movies full screen. The only problem is the zoom in DivX mode. There's only 1 zoom setting as opposed to 4 whilst playing a DVD, and it's too much. It makes a 2.35:1 encoded movie fit a 4:3 screen and as such it is far too blocky, there really needs to be an in-between zoom like it has whilst playing a DVD.

Apart from that it's great, I've just watched The Lord of the Rings DVD's on a projector pointing at a 6ft wide screen and the quality was fantastic, on a TV it looks even better.

I've tried the following DVD players

Pacific 1002W

Dual (from Asda)

Samsung DVD-235

and this is easily the best DVD player I've tried so far. For the price, this is Definitely recomended!

UMAX is a company that made its name with its quality-made scanner range for years now. When I first saw the name of this player (UMAX Yamada), it was easy to be sceptical for two reasons:

1)UMAX is famous for its scanners, so what do they know about DVD player design?

2)Yamada sounded to me like a name rip-off of Yamaha, an unfortunate choice of name for this player.

So I was sceptical until I read the reviews of people who already bought this player. I went for it and bought one too. My initial scepticism was blown to pieces when I actually layed my hands on the machine itself. I couldn't have been more mistaken. This player is excellent.

Got it a few days ago, and updated the firmware on it before using it. To download the latest firware for it go to http://www.umax.de/WebNew/index.htm

Obviously you need a CD writer to burn the firmware file on a CD in order to upgrade the firmware, and don't forget to read the included text file before burning the firmware on CD. If you are not sure on how to make a data-CD with the firmware on it do not do it yourself, ask someone who understands CD formats to do it for you.

So far this little beauty played everything I threw at it. You can download mpg, mpg, avi asf, mp3, DivX files etc. or create your own and don't have to convert them to a DVD, or VCD or a SVCD, just copy the files as they are on a CD or DVD (preferably a re-writable one so you can have the option to erase the files you don't want later), and put the CD/DVD in the machine, it will open an Explorer-type window like a PC, and let you browse the files and play them. If you burn JPEG pictures on a CD or DVD it will automatically play them as slideshows. It has worked well with both UDF and ISO formated CDs/DVDs, no matter if they were CD-R/RW or DVD-R/RW or DVD+R/RW, it played them all. I ripped my camcorder footage on the hard drive of my PC creating AVI files and copied them on a DVD, which played perfectly on the Yamada. Before I got this player I had to convert all my camcorder footage to DVD or VCD in order to play them on my Sony DVD player(the Sony couldn't even play SVCDs, and it costed almost double the money of the Yamada). Now I just burn my camcorder AVI files on CDs or DVDs and can watch them on my TV without further encoding.

DVD playback quality is really good and I recommend for you to use the S-Video connection for better picture quality. A SCART cable is included in the package but I DON'T recommend for you to use it, it is not gold-plated and remember that a SCART connection on older or cheap TV sets will produce worse picture quality than S-Video. An S-Video to S-Video cable is not included, so you have to buy one, a gold-plated one for better results.

Overall, a great player at a great price. And upgradeable too by updating the firmware when new ones become available. Thumbs up to UMAX for creating this machine and making it availble at such a good price.

We have had our Yamada DVX-6100 for about 4weeks now. Had a bit of trouble upgrading the firmware.(this was mostly our own fault as we were not sure how to do it). Finally managed this and everything is working fine. Plays everything we have downloaded. Very pleased with it.

uk reviewer.

Great player for under 100 pounds, plays divx3, divx4, divx5, xvid and all normal formats, latest firmware solves most of the issues it had, as a dvd player its also very good plays lots of different regions and pal/ntsc straight out the box, grab this now!!!