AStar DVD-3800 Progressive Scan DVD Player

With a plethora of choices available on the market for a home DVD player, to stand out from the crowd a DVD player needs to deliver excellent video and audio quality, a low price and visual appeal in order be competitive. The market for budget DVD players is filled with numerous choices available for less than $50. These budget DVD players will provide adequate video and audio quality that meets the needs of most families. While the AStar DVD-3800 offers a few nice features for a very budget-friendly price, it ultimately falls short of the competition.

Look and Feel

This single-disc DVD player is slim and compact, weighing in at 5.2 lbs. and measuring only about 3 inches in height. The unit is silver colored with the basic Play, Pause, Stop, etc. buttons evenly spread out along the front face. The display produces bright green status message once the unit is turned on, and the disc tray is located in the middle front face.

The back of the unit features a number of connection options. For video, it includes output options for regular RCA (yellow), S-Video or component outputs. For audio, it includes 1 TOSLINK optical, 1 coaxial optical and 5.1 analog outputs.

Features

The unit includes playback capability of a large number of media formats - standard DVDs, CD, DVD-R/RW, DVD+R/RW, DVCD, SVCD, VCD, CD-DA, CD-R/RW, MP3 and finally Kodak Picture CD. Note that this player does not support video coded in the DivX format. It is also able to display standard 4:3 DVDs, although instead of automatically adjusting the aspect ratio to match the source content it requires you to manually change the aspect ratio using the on-screen menus.

The OSD (on-screen display) allows you to configure a number of video and audio settings, as well the parental control settings. The parental control settings allow you to restrict viewing according to the MPAA rating, with any movie rated higher than the parental setting requiring a 4-digit password to be entered before the DVD player will play the movie.

The unit features progressive scan when connected using the component output, as well as a built-in Dolby Pro Logic decoder to create virtual surround sound with stereo source material.

Performance

To test the video and audio quality of the AStar DVD-3800, I watched two movies. The first was a comedy - "Along Came Polly" - and the second was an action movie - "The Matrix Revolutions". I tested the DVD player on two TVs - the Panasonic PT-61LCX65 61" rear projection LCD and the Sony WEGA 27" CRT.