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.
Playback 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 of my TV’s – my Panasonic PT-61LCX65 61” rear projection LCD and my Sony WEGA 27” CRT.
The testing started off on a very bad note. After connecting the DVD-3800 to my Sony TV with component cable for the video and standard RCA red / white for the audio, the only sound that came out of the TV was the background music. There was no dialogue and no sound effects. After trying a different set of audio cables and also connecting the player to my
Panasonic PT-61LCX65 LCD Projection HDTV, I was stuck with the same problem. I read through the manual and found very little help. Only vague suggestions were listed in the Troubleshooting section, such as “Ensure that you have set the players audio settings correctly.” After fiddling around with the on-screen audio settings, I was finally able to fix the sound issue by changing the Analog Out settings to 2-channel. This was frustrating since there is no reason not to expect a DVD player to be fully functional out of the box. There should be no need to adjust any settings in order for it to work correctly. To add to my frustration, the remote control was only reliable when pointed directly at the center of the unit and only 2-3 feet to the left or right of the unit.
The video quality of the DVD-3800 is also lacking, regardless of whether progressive scan was utilized. Even on my Panasonic TV with progressive scan, a number of motion artifacts were visible in the action scenes of “The Matrix Revolutions”. In particular, the battle scenes between the humans and the Sentinel machines contained some sort of streaking lines above the objects as they moved up or down the screen. The color reproduction is acceptable, with faithful reproduction of colors without being washed out or over saturated, but does not match the same level of accuracy in higher-end DVD players.
Testing of the audio, once the settings were corrected, revealed that the DVD-3800 does an admirable job producing sound using either of the digital audio outputs. In both movies I watched, the dialogue and sound effects were clear and well defined and the player had no trouble with the low-to-high spectrum of sound.
Another feature noticeably missing was auto-resume. After watching part of a movie, and then stopping it and turning off the DVD player, there is no automatic resume feature that allows you to start from where the movie left off. So you are either forced to fast forward and “guesstimate“ where you left off, or start over and watch the movie from the beginning.
What’s in the Box
DVD Player
Remote control with 2 AA batteries
Power cord
RCA A/V cord (red, white and yellow)
User manual
Technical Specifications
Number of Discs - Single Disc Capacity
Playback Formats - DVD Video, CD, DVD-R/RW, DVD R/RW, DVCD, SVCD, VCD, CD-DA, CD-R/RW, MP3, Kodak Picture CD
Progressive Scan – Yes
Audio Processing Type - Dolby ®Digital & DTS® 5.1 Built-In Decoders
Horizontal Resolution - Over 500 Lines
NTSC & PAL System Disc Play & Output Auto Switching Output
Video Digital to Analog Converter - 27MHz/10-Bit
Video S/N Ratio - More and Equal to 50 dB
Number & Type of Video Outputs - Component, S-Video, Composite
Audio Digital to Analog Converter - 192kHz/24-Bit Audio
Number & Type of Audio Outputs - 2 Channel, 5.1 Channel, Optical & Coaxial Digital
Conclusion
The AStar DVD-3800 suffers from sub-par video quality and a troublesome out-of-the-box experience, and does very little to stand out from other budget DVD players. Despite solid audio quality and attractive styling, this DVD player misses the mark.
