| Buying Your First DVD Player |
I’m a cheapskate, I hate shopping, and I detest having to install and get used to using new equipment. That’s why I was so reluctant to buy a DVD player. I was comfortable watching movies at home on videotape, and I figured that since the important thing was the artistic quality of the movies, it wouldn’t matter that much whether I watched them on videotape or DVD.
But several months ago I took the DVD plunge, and now I won’t rent or buy anything on videotape if I can get it on DVD. The reasons are, of course, that DVD provides better picture, better sound, and a variety of special features, such as director’s commentaries, documentaries, deleted scenes, outtakes, explanations of how special effects were achieved, etc. And all of this has come at a lower cost and with fewer hassles than I expected. There are several excellent DVD players available for about $200, and the tenacious shopper can probably find an acceptable one for as little as $100 to $130.
Although it’s pretty clear that DVD is here to stay, it’s still a developing technology in some respects. Yet I believe the situation is stable enough that now is as good a time as any to buy a DVD player, and I think that in most cases the benefits for the movie lover far outweigh the costs and risks involved. While I can’t cover every possible consideration in buying a DVD player, I can briefly describe most of the things that most first-time buyers need to keep in mind.
Before you run out and buy a DVD player, take the time to understand what it’s going to take to hook it up. If you intend, as most people do, to connect the DVD player directly to a television set, look the TV set over carefully to see if it has at least one place to plug in what are called AV jacks. A set of AV receptacles consists of two or three small holes lined up in a row that are usually labeled "video" and "audio." If these receptacles are present at all, expect each set of receptacles to consist of one hole for video plus two holes for audio on a stereo TV or one hole for audio on a monaural TV. If present, AV receptacles are typically located on the front or the back of the TV set, sometimes behind a little door that flips open.
If the TV set you’re planning to connect the DVD player to doesn’t have AV receptacles, you’re probably looking at an older TV set, and you might want to consider postponing buying a DVD player until you get a newer TV -- after all, videotape is still a pretty good way to watch a movie. However, if you’re bound and determined to connect a DVD player to your older TV set, you can probably do it by buying an additional device called an RF modulator, available at places like Radio Shack for about $30. But be advised that this way of hooking up a DVD player degrades the picture quality. And by the way, if you connect a DVD player to a VCR that is connected to a TV, the video and/or audio you get when you play a DVD is likely to be unsatisfactory.
If the TV set you’re planning to connect the DVD player to has at least one set of AV receptacles, hooking up the DVD player should be a piece of cake. If the AV receptacles are present and buying a DVD player at the lowest possible price is your only concern, you probably won’t go too far wrong to just go out and buy the cheapest DVD player you can find. Then rent a DVD at a video store, and ten minutes after you’re home you can probably be watching it, having connected your TV to your new DVD player using the cables that came with it. The salesperson who sells you the DVD player will probably try to get you to spend an additional $10 or so to buy better cables than the ones supplied with the player, but it seems to me it does no harm to defer that decision.
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