What can you expect from a sub £40 player? Exactly. Well, set your expectations a little higher, because the Pacific DVD-1002 delivers good value for money with an overall acceptable if not somewhat rounded performance.

Set up is a straight forward affair although the remote, with it's zillions of tiny buttons is a bit of a nightmare, especially during late night viewing in the dark (buttons too small, all of similar size and lay out poor). However, this is nothing more than a niggle and at £40, you shouldn't rise to complain too soon.

Picture performance is better than reasonable if not a little soft at times and using a good quality interconnect (gold plated phono cables around £10/pair) the sound quality is astonishing for the money.

It might just be my particular player that has a defect, but occasionally, I experience a synchronisation problem between the dialogue and the picture (essentially, the words don't fit the movement of the mouths!) This tends to happen if the player has been running for a long time.

Multi-region hacking is a doddle and the hacking sequence of opening and closing the draw and pressing a few buttons on the remote can be downloaded from the internet easily (ask Jeeves or go Googling).

Inputs and outputs are well provided for, another surprise given the price tag. Both coaxial and optical digital outputs are present, together with phono out and scart. Using a gold plated scart cable makes a substantial difference to the picture quality.

Overall, the 1002 can hold its head up high in the ever-increasing world of budget DVD players, many of which don't do much to even justify their measly price.

Buy with confidence.

who cares how cheap this unit looks. For 44 quid from Asda how can you complain. The unit plays anything you throw at it and the multiregion works fine. As a second player for the bedroom you cant go wrong

I got one of these in April and thought it was great to start with when I was mainly watching VCDs or SVCDs. Unfortunately I found recently that there was an annoying vibration sound for the first few minutes of most DVDs. I didn't have the same problem on VCDs, SVCDs or audio CDs.

My dad's Pacific has the same problem but the noise is less noticeable and he is a bit deaf anyway.

I decided to take it back to ASDA who replaced without any bother. The replacement is less noisy but the playback is less good. Some DVDs, in particular, are pretty jerky.

Its a shame really because the spec is pretty amazing for something that comes in at less than £45 now.