Yamada DVX-6600

I first bought my 6600 in 2004 purely for the reason of freeing up my already cluttered up hard drive. Found it to invaluable. Even now four years later it has given me no reason to complain or grumble. Being able to play most forms of video codecs its been great to play what ever my TV card has recorded when the computer itself has had trouble. Being able to play MP3 DVDs means I can have a pretty full juxebox when friends come round even though it would have been nice to have a screensaver or animation like either the computer or modern games consoles have.

I paid £79 for a Yamada DVX-6600 in March 2004, and was pleased it played almost everything I'd downloaded from the net. However, after 2 weeks the power unit died, and the player was replaced. 6 months later, the disc spin mechanism failed and the player was replaced. 5 months later (and just within warranty) the sound became echoed, and the machine was replaced. I managed to get a month's extended warranty from the retailer, and just as well because 2 weeks later the sound went again and they sent me another model!

Having downloaded a huge quantity of movies onto my hard drive and being sick of watching them on my lovely Belina 17" monitor I decided to get hold of a DivX/Xvid DVD player.

Whilst out doing a bit of Christmas shopping I popped into WH Smith and guess what. Yamada 6600 DivX player for £59.00 (usually about £70) and guess my joy when the cashier says to me "there's another £10 off "

Woo Hoo! As Homer would say.

The unit comes in a silver finish and slim at roughly 6cm thick. The on/off button is located to the far left of the machine and a set of operational buttons are situated along the top right edge of the unit.

The disk tray ejects from the centre of the unit and there has been much written since it's only a fraction bigger/thicker than a standard CD case. The other thing to note is that it doesn't actually fully eject, leaving the user having to tuck the disk in about 1.5cm. This has caused the odd problem as when the tray closes it catches a disk that's not placed completely on the tray and doesn't close properly

The picture quality is unusually average with pixilation present on most titles via gold SCART socket viewed on a 28" television. With the RGB turned on red blurring occurred on the top and bottom edges of the screen. This has never been present on any of the other DVD players that I have reviewed (http://www.reviewcentre.com/review30295.html - http://www.reviewcentre.com/review34731.html - http://www.reviewcentre.com/review10302.html - http://www.reviewcentre.com/review19714.html - http://www.reviewcentre.com/review29869.html). With the RGB turned off the picture is decidedly poor with a real lack of punch. Although sharpness and brightness and contrast could be controlled independently, this did not improve the overall richness of the picture.

Sound quality comes in the form of a 5.1 Dolby stereo set up. Apart from that there really isn't anything else to say. Unlike previous DVD players with 5.1 set up this model doesn't come with any extra bass, Virtual Surround Sound (VSS) or environmental enhancements. Initially I believed the bass connection was faulty since I was not getting any sound, but going into the set up and switching the sub "off" and back "on" seemed to solve this problem.

One of the great things about this player is the ability to play any region disk without the need for any remote/firmware hack. Placing Spiderman 2 (region 3) and Underworld (also region 3) both with RCE the DVD player just started playback of these disks with no problems.

Placing a CDRW with mixed content displayed an explorer-esq menu screen with folders and other content on it. Pictures could be viewed as a slideshow or thumbnail format, but unlike the AMW P80L (http://www.reviewcentre.com/review119487.html) it couldn't play a music file and play the slideshow simultaneously, a slightly annoying aspect. Switching off the machine completely also meant losing the last memory of the disk playback position (unlike the AMW P80L).

On the upside the player performed well with DivX and Xvid formatted disks whether on CDR/RW DVD+/-R and mixed content. I attempted to access subtitles on an DivX formatted filmed with no luck, but this might have been the way that I formatted the disk. Admittedly no were in the literature did it state that it could support subtitles on non-DVD titles.

Conclusion

This unit has sold in there thousands with generally raving reviews from users. I have to say on balance that it did "what it said on the tin", but just that and no more. Considering that the Yamada/Umax 5520 DVD player has all the audio adjustments it seems a shame that this model couldn't replicate these positive aspects of the player.

This is still a good DivX/Xvid player, but if you didn't have or was not going to use this file format I would recommend the AMW P80L instead. Yamada has just brought out the 6700 with subtitle support for DivX/Xvid and a few other goodies

This is a Brilliant DVD Player, well worth the price. I also trust that in the future the software upgrades will make this machine the ultimate DVD-Divx player around.

I purchased my Yamada DVX-6600 for about £50 and it has performed faultlessly. Easy to use, clear instructions and even the kids can use it age 5 and 6 so not sure what is wrong with one of your other reviewers. Unfortunately it only takes one bad experience due to faults or user error to malign an excellent product. Hopefully this will help even things up!

I just wanted to set the record straight from the bad review I read here. I was very skeptical about this machine being able to play a variety of avis. As soon as I had it set up, which was very straight forward I started testing it with a variety of formats. It exceeded my expectations. From about twenty files on both cd's DVD+ DVD- cdrw and dvdrw + it played all but two with picture and sound quality equal to using my computer which is loaded with every codec under the sun. It exceeded my expectations. This player was bought for use in my son's bedroom and if it continues to perform as well over the next couple of months I might well consider another for convenience in the living room. I was very impressed with the easy to operate zoom feature. Its four settings allow the watching of letterbox movies in full screen mode quite efficiently picked this up of the net for £54.99 + £4 p&p which I consider money well spent. Kelloo will point you in the right direction.

I would not reccommend the Yamada DVX-6600 player to anyone. The manufacturer (UMAX) should be held responsible for lying to the customers as this machine should costs 10 quid in your local Tesco. Plays 1 from 10 MPEG4 discs, even stucks with some DVDs. Looks like the laser is very cheap and processor is very slow. I feel that better I would go for DIVx players of Philips or JVC you can buy now for the same price. I would suggest to look around first. Upgrade does not help. Please do not buy this junk. And also be careful with UMAX because if you buy player from them and something will go wrong YOU will have to pay for the delivery!

I a Yamada DVX-6600 in June 2004. It cost me £74.99, although you can get it now for £10.00 less. I needed a good Divx machine, and I was very happy to see it would also play other formats. Upon receiving the machine I tried most of the formats: VCD, MP3, Jpeg, Divx, AVI. It plays most things - but not all. It sometimes gets stuck and I have to switch off & on. It is also very slow to get going - sometime up to a minute before the file is shown. Please note: it does not play Window Media files: music or video; It will not play certain AVI / MPEG / Divx files, or will show picture without sound, or the sound cuts off and does not play properly. These issues are probably due to lack of codec's in the original firmware. I have upgraded successfully the firmware from umax.de site, but it did not help with the files I had problems with. The upgrade apparently had to do with subtitles and language support issues, which did not interest me much. This machine works, and it is good value for money, but it needs many upgrades still to 'catch up' with the latest codec's.