Philips DVP 3266 DVD player

I still get lots of queries about DVD players. The demand is clearly alive and kicking, even as Blu-ray is slowly but surely spreading its wings. As of now DVD rentals are still very big, and so are DVD players, thus I decided to do an ‘old fashioned’ slim DVD player for review purposes. Philips have many models, so I called for the DVP 3266. You can say—it’s got the spotlight.

Design
The unit is a lightweight rectangular box, with a very simple and straight up design. The finish for the chassis is brushed aluminum, with a black reflective plastic faceplate. The tray is camouflaged with the same finish and sits flush in the left side, while the LED display is on the right. Leftmost bears the Philips logo, while the USB slot is located on the far east of the front panel. The bottom strip is metallic again and has a couple of uniformly colored thin buttons for power on/off, eject and navigation.

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The back panel has a patch of i/o a the left end, which consist of Composite video and component video outs, analog 5.1 audio out and coaxial (digital) audio out. The power cord is attached, and along with the unit we get a 3 way RCA cord, which can be used to make the component video connection.

Features
There is no HDMI, thus no HD up scaling experiments, which actually is a good breather. I will check component connection and its quirks with color accuracy, video signal bandwidth and other fun analog video attributes. The complete specification are in the image above, though I will tell you what is not there. It cannot play MPEG4 part 10 which includes H.264 or AVC coded videos, and mainly only AVI/MPG containers work. Thus DivX/Xvid, and off course DVDS, VCDS, audio CDs and MP3s work.

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Performance
The first thing is check in any player is the response speed and startup time. This one is almost instant, and the OSD comes onscreen quite fast, though it’s not ‘in a flash’. From the factory it comes region locked (that is common amongst these players) though if you have region 1 disc you can still play them, call the vendor or the Philips guy, its the simplest solution.

In both Disc and USB mode the response was prompt, though the system chokes a bit when you press more than 3 buttons in quick succession. This happens on a regular basis. The settings available are minimalist, though not too much is required here; the progressive scan option is turned on by default and should be kept that way.

I played DVE test disc, and ran the color and signal timing tests, which yielded one very strong point of the DVD player and that is near perfect color reproduction. This included very less banding in smooth color gradients of the image, and skin tones too looked nice. Patchiness was hardly there, though some intense colored montages I have did look a little strained. Another issue to check for, since its analog signal, is noise, which could be a part of the included cable. The cable included is a very ordinary one, though noise was really not a problem. Not that it was absent, but I can pass it, this is my subjective opinion.

Next is to check for de interlacing artifacts, and motion scenes, as this is also affected by the source player, in this case, our DVP3266. This department was not too impressive or spectacular, as blurring, artifacts did show up in noticeable amounts. But still I’ve seen way worse, and this player has quite a reasonable price thus i won’t minus too much points.

Conclusion
This player costs 3450 MRP and retails for around Rs.3100. It is very much available, so if the store keeper says otherwise, you need to give that store a miss. The price is very reasonable, and this player works well, and quality is also above average. No HDMI upscaling here, but if you have a good, large LCD TV then that will anyways do the upscaling for you. Check it out.