Philips 5996K DVD player

I personally like Philips as a brand; they have earned a reputation over the years by constantly delivering decent products. Especially their DVD players, which have never failed to impress us. The product we have is new, and loaded with features, but off course no verdicts until the review is done, so let’s check it out — the DVP5996K.

Design and Features
The DVP 5996 has a sleek metallic chassis, with a coat of black all around the body. The front panel has a glossy finished panel, bordered by a silver strip. The aesthetics are minimalist but classy — there is no element of loud and tacky elements anywhere. The Philips logo is soberly positioned dead center of the front panel, with the tray to its left. The right extremity of the front panel has an EP input for a Mic, a USB 2.0 in, and also two flush mounted, round buttons that simply illustrate ‘play’ and ‘stop’. The corners of the body are rounded, which adds to the good looks.

Now, this DVD player doesn’t just play DVDs. It has a karaoke feature (thus the mic input), with little gimmicks that display animated pictures, and rate your singing. Secondly, it can rip MP3s directly to a flash drive in the USB port, from a CD spinning in the disc. Next we have support for quite a few formats including DivX Ultra certification. The player has HDMI out, with 1080p up scaling. Speaking of HDMI, the package includes an HDMI cable. There is a coaxial digital audio out, beside component video outputs. For a complete list of connectivity and specifications please view specs pic.

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The remote aesthetically matches the unit to a large extent, with a black face and white clear fonts for the buttons. These buttons are well laid out, with the numerical matrix at eh bottom, while the top half has the menu and navigation buttons. There is one touch control for the audio ripping function, switching to USB device etc.

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Performance
Initially we checked loading and booting times. From standby to fully on, the DVP 5996K takes an average of 10 seconds; it could have been faster. Tray Eject after stopping a DVD takes just a sec, and menu navigation, switching to USB also is very fast. We used a 16 GB Transcend flash drive, loaded with DivX files of Kung Fu Panda and Hulk. The player does not play WMV files.

In DVDs we were using our DVE test disc and I am Legend. Before playing anything, we had to go to the menu and enable 1080p upscaling, and also choose the digital audio output. Then on, we had calibration images along with the player’s simple video adjustment menu. A little nudge on the contrast got the picture more brighter, while the low end of the dynamic range was pretty good for a budget player. The minute detail in black and dark levels were quite impressive.

Next thing to see was the color reproduction, whether there was any major color banding or patchiness. To our pleasant surprise, here too the player honestly tried its best, especially in vivid scenes of King Fu Panda.