I tested out my friend Ziggy’s Phillips portable DVD player the other day and I was fairly well impressed. It was a Phillips portable DVD player pet824 with an 8.5 inch screen. This wasn’t the best portable DVD player I’ve ever used by a long shot, but I liked it a lot.  Although the outer casing was made out of that semi-soft, bendy kind of plastic, the machine is solidly put together. It looks and feels like it can take a pretty hard treatment and still continue working.

I never owned or used a Philips portable DVD player before so I was curious to see what they had to offer. Having stimulated my interest, I started investigating further. Overall, these are pretty good DVD players in the middle range of the field. Most are priced between $125 and about $250, which in my opinion is kind of high for the product.

All the Philips portable DVD models I looked at have the same look and feel to them; shiny plastic with rounded edges on the outside, and slightly thicker than most others of the same screen size. The controls on the unit were well placed, easy to figure out and simple to operate.

Picture quality is really good and Philips promotes something called their “bright dot policy”, which is supposed to impose a strict intolerance of any LCD imperfections known as bright dots. I’m not sure how much of that is marketing hype, but they do make a very nice LCD that puts out very decent picture quality. The thing I like most about the Philips portable DVD players is that they are all capable of playing just about any format you can throw at them, so there is no problem if you want to watch DivX, Mpeg4, etc.

The sound is pretty good too, although I was a little surprised to see that some models only have 1 headphone jack. In this price range, I really think that 2 headphone jacks should be the standard. As with all but the top end portable DVD players, the onboard speakers produce only fair sound quality. Employ an average set of ear buds or quality headphones and the sound is actually very good.

Battery life is good and ranges from 4 to 6 hours depending on the unit model you select, and the batteries themselves are a bit on the bulky and heavy side.

The following models have received solid feedback in Phillips portable DVD player reviews by consumers who own them:

Philips portable DVD player dcp750
Philips portable DVD player pet 702
Philips portable DVD player pet824
Philips portable DVD player pet1030
Philips portable DVD player dcp850