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.

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.