Tell
me if any of this sounds familiar:
You want to buy a DVD-Video player to impress your friends with your techo-hipness
(and besides, you're tired of watching fuzzy VHS rentals). You have a digital
surround receiver, so the player doesn't need a Dolby Digital or DTS decoder.
You have a growing collection of music compilations, so the player should be
able to handle recordable CD-R discs. You also have a growing number of CD-Rs
on which you've recorded music from the Internet, so it'd be great if the player
decoded MP3 files as well. You'd like to have both S-video and component-video
outputs. Of course, you want a selection of cool features and a well-designed,
easy-to-use remote to control it all. Attractive styling wouldn't be a bad thing.
Finally, you'd appreciate getting all this for, oh . . . around $200.
Congratulations! I think I've found your player.
The Samsung DVD-M301 has a nice silver-gray finish. I like that color - I'm
going to buy a silver-gray Audi TT someday. The player's front-panel styling
has a modicum of tasteful flair. The control set is pretty basic, but there
is a jog/shuttle knob for functions like frame advance, chapter/track selection,
and fast forward and reverse. There's also a headphone jack with level control.
Around back, two RCA connectors provide analog audio output, while another RCA
jack and a Toslink connector provide coaxial and optical digital audio output.
A slide switch selects between composite/S-video and component-video output.
The remote is several cuts above average. Its silver face matches the player,
and the black lettering on its white buttons is highly legible. Better yet,
the buttons are well laid out, and there is even a small thumb-operated joystick.
If only the buttons glowed in the dark . . . . The remote duplicates the front
panel's controls and adds such perks as slow motion, subtitle-language selection,
and three bookmarks. It also lets you engage Spatializer N-2-2 virtual surround
sound for listening through just two speakers, 2X scan with normal-pitch audio
(great for watching boring movies in half the time), A-B repeat, 2X and 4X picture
zoom, and a digest function that simultaneously shows the beginnings of nine
chapters.
An interesting feature that will make video purists shriek is Screen Fit, which expands the picture so that a widescreen movie fills a standard 4:3 aspect ratio screen. Overall, the feature set is surprisingly good for a $230 player.
Installation was a snap. I connected the player's optical digital and analog audio outputs to my receiver and its component-video output to my TV. The onscreen setup menu is very clean and was easier to use than those of some high-price players. A Display button calls up a tidy onscreen readout of the title number, chapter/track numbers, elapsed time, soundtrack type, subtitle language, and volume setting.
To check out the player's video performance, I turned to the DVD of The Five Senses (New Line), an independent Canadian film with a plot that explores the realms of sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch. The film's clever use of sensory input begins in Chapter 1 as a woman steps from a sensory-deprivation tank and sits on a bed, its white sheets inviting in the softly lit room with its warm, muted colors. In a darkened room in Chapter 2, a fish tank is softly illuminated from below and from a window beyond as silver fish swim in the cloudy water. The DVD-M301 displayed these tricky shots without any obvious artifacts, but its MPEG-2 decoding, or video digital-to-analog (D/A) conversion, produced images that didn't seem to be quite as crisp as those I've seen from the best players.
The film's Dolby Digital 5.1 mix is ingenious. In Chapter 2, a man listens intently through a heating vent to a conversation in an adjacent room. The sound is muffled and indistinct but becomes clearer as the camera pans through the wall, revealing a woman hugging her child in soft light. In Chapter 7, a man regards a seascape on the wall. As the camera moves into the painting, the sounds of the sea - gulls and crashing waves - increase in all the channels until they fill the room. Also in Chapter 7, a woman makes a phone call from an airport pay phone; she does not hear - but we do - the faint sound of a TV news report in the background describing a child's abduction. Of course, my receiver did all the heavy lifting to decode the Dolby Digital signal, but at least the player read it off the disc and passed it on without a glitch.
To check out the player's audio D/A converters, I played a couple of CDs including Blue by Third Eye Blind, an interesting Left Coast rocker. On songs like "The Red Summer Sun" the guitars and vocals really wail, but the DVD-M301 kept everything under control, with clean delineation of the complex musical textures in this dynamic mix. In short, there were no problems with CD sound quality. However, the transport was sluggish during CD playback - backward track skipping in particular was painfully slow.
One of the player's important perks is its dual laser, which enables it to play write-once CD-R music discs as well as the rewritable CD-RWs I tried. I also played a variety of discs on which I've recorded MP3 tracks. Although the spiffy DVD/CD menus are not operable in this mode, the player obediently displayed a rudimentary list of folder and file names onscreen and let me select files for playback. Choosing files is, as usual, like navigating a file/folder arrangement on a Windows PCor a Mac.
The owner's manual warns that MP3 files recorded at bit rates of less than 128 kilobits per second (kbps) might not play back properly (it's not clear whether it means there'll be glitches or an inherent degradation in sound quality), but I successfully played files with bit rates ranging from 32 to 320 kbps. Track navigation and decoding worked well; as always, sound quality was primarily a function of the bit rate. I also played discs with MP3 files in some folders but not in others. The player found and played the MP3 files and ignored the other data.
Sometimes you pay a lot for things you think will impress your friends. But your friends should be even more impressed when you spend less and get a good deal. The Samsung DVD-M301 isn't just a good deal - it's a terrific deal, one of the best I've seen. It offers a comprehensive but sensible feature set - including all the stuff you need and omitting stuff you probably don't - as well as CD-R and MP3 playback, and component-video output, for a low price. Your friends will be very impressed. In fact, at this price, you could probably buy players for them, too. Now, that's really impressive.
Fast Facts:
|
Key Features:
Dimensions: |
In The Lab
| CD
AUDIO PLAYBACK All tests except defect tracking were made with Sound & Vision's test CD-RW using signals containing dither, which sets limits on measured distortion and noise performance. |
|
| Maximum output | 2.0 volts |
| Frequency response | 20 Hz to 20 kHz +0.05 dB, -0.1 dB |
| Noise level | (re -20 dBFS, A-wtd) -74.7 dB |
| Excess noise (without/with sine-wave signal) | |
| 16-bit
(EN16) quasi-20-bit (EN20) |
+0.4/+0.4
dB |
| Distortion (THD+N, 1 kHz) | |
|
at 0 dBFS
|
0.0047% 0.021% |
| Linearity error (at -90 dBFS) | +0.2 dB |
| Noise modulation | 0.5 dB |
| Defect tracking | (Pierre Verany test disc) 200 µm |
| DVD-VIDEO
PERFORMANCE Measurements were made from a variety of DVD test discs, all through the player's composite-video output except as noted. |
|
| Maximum white level | +2 IRE |
| Setup level | +7.5 IRE |
| Differential gain | 0% |
| Differential phase | 0° |
| Horizontal luminance frequency response | |
| (re
level at 1 MHz) at 4 MHz ±0 dB at 5 MHz -0.6 dB at 6 MHz -0.9 dB at 6.75 MHz (DVD limit) -1.1 dB |
|
| Onscreen resolution | 540 lines |
| Pixel cropping | left 0, right 0, top 0, bottom 4 |
| In-player letterboxing | poor |
| Component-output level error | |
| (Y/Pr/Pb) +5.3/-11.6/-12.7% | |
| Component-output timing error | |
| (Pr/Pb) +9/+8 nanoseconds | |
The player's main deficiency on the test bench was its large component-output color-level errors, which can lead to less saturated colors in the image than from the other outputs. Not all component-input monitors can correct for this problem. - David Ranada