Product Features:

• 12.1-inch high-resolution TFT LCD screen with progressive-scan display
• Extremely thin design--approximately 1-inch thick for easy transport
• 3 headphone jacks let the whole family listen; plays DVD-R, picture CD and MP3-encoded CD
• Widescreen (16:9 aspect ratio) format matches your favorite DVDs
• Includes rechargeable battery and credit-card remote control

Product Description:

Early Adopters Pick: November 2003. The world's first portable DVD player with a 12-inch LCD screen. Pushing the limits of portability, Samsung's widescreen DVD-L1200 DVD player manages to pack a laptop-rivaling 12-inch TFT LCD screen into a chassis standing a mere inch high when folded. Enjoy the best of your movies, music, and digital photography through the player's multiformat playback abilities, including MP3 and JPEG image CD-Rs and CD-RWs as well as standard DVD-Videos, DVD-Rs, and commercial CDs. The whole family can listen, too, through either the unit's inline stereo speakers or its generous three .125-inch headphone jacks. Spatializer virtual surround simulates enveloping sound effects through two channels, and motion zoom allows extreme magnification of selected screen areas, without distortion, even while a movie is playing. The screen displays discs using 480p progressive scanning (named for the number of horizontal lines that compose the video image), creating a high-resolution picture with sharper images and fewer motion artifacts than conventional portables. Other great features include screen inversion, which flips the widescreen picture vertically so you can mount the player upside down, as in a kitchen or an RV, and Samsung's Smart Screen Brightness Control, which monitors ambient light and adjusts the LCD's backlight accordingly to improve clarity and contrast and extended your battery life. The unit's rugged disc bay ensures that the show goes on no matter how you position the player. Composite- and S-video outputs let you hook the player up with your home television, while its coaxial digital-audio output will channel discrete, 5.1-channel Dolby Digital and DTS surround sound to a range of audio/video receivers and surround speaker setups. For extra convenience, the AV output doubles as a switchable AV input, letting you hook up a camcorder or gaming device for portable big-screen viewing. What's in the Box DVD player, battery pack (affixes to back of player), AC adapter, power cord, credit-card remote control, remote battery, composite- and S-video interconnect cables, stereo analog audio interconnect, user's manual, and warranty information.

Description from Manufacturer:Early Adopters Pick: November 2003. The world's first portable DVD player with a 12-inch LCD screen.

Pushing the limits of portability, Samsung's widescreen DVD-L1200 DVD player manages to pack a laptop-rivaling 12-inch TFT LCD screen into a chassis standing a mere inch high when folded. Enjoy the best of your movies, music, and digital photography through the player's multiformat playback abilities, including MP3 and JPEG image CD-Rs and CD-RWs as well as standard DVD-Videos, DVD-Rs, and commercial CDs.

The whole family can listen, too, through either the unit's inline stereo speakers or its generous three .125-inch headphone jacks. Spatializer virtual surround simulates enveloping sound effects through two channels, and motion zoom allows extreme magnification of selected screen areas, without distortion, even while a movie is playing.

The screen displays discs using 480p progressive scanning (named for the number of horizontal lines that compose the video image), creating a high-resolution picture with sharper images and fewer motion artifacts than conventional portables.

Other great features include screen inversion, which flips the widescreen picture vertically so you can mount the player upside down, as in a kitchen or an RV, and Samsung's Smart Screen Brightness Control, which monitors ambient light and adjusts the LCD's backlight accordingly to improve clarity and contrast and extended your battery life. The unit's rugged disc bay ensures that the show goes on no matter how you position the player.

Composite- and S-video outputs let you hook the player up with your home television, while its coaxial digital-audio output will channel discrete, 5.1-channel Dolby Digital and DTS surround sound to a range of audio/video receivers and surround speaker setups. For extra convenience, the AV output doubles as a switchable AV input, letting you hook up a camcorder or gaming device for portable big-screen viewing.

What's in the Box
DVD player, battery pack (affixes to back of player), AC adapter, power cord, credit-card remote control, remote battery, composite- and S-video interconnect cables, stereo analog audio interconnect, user's manual, and warranty information.Average Customer Rating:

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Comment: Not worth its price Rating:
This is the best portable player out there? Really? I owned this for about two weeks and decided it wasn't worth its price.

The DVD player comes neatly packed inside the box with all its accessories mention in the specs except that it comes with a soft leather case. The player has a huge display at 12.1" and looks like a laptop when closed. The design is thin and light and can easily be carried around while watching. The gray finish is sleek and looks high-tech but when viewed on bright light the finish looks cheap reminds me of a bad paint job at an auto shop. You can tell around the CD lid the paint is rough makes it look cheap and it also looks like some dirt or dust got in while in the process of drying the paint. Samsungs logo could have looked better if they only embedded their logo in silver like what Sony always does with their TVs. I'm not sure what kind of factory they have but it looks like they better start paying their workers more and establish quality control.

The player was a little hard to open; you can't open the player with one hand. It forces you to open it slowly. The CD lid feels cheap, it sprang quickly once ejected to reveal its lens. I looked under it and saw just a thin spring that's doing all that. I imagined in the long run that thing is going to give up. The Power button is coated with chrome which was a good idea. It saves the paint from fading from over used. The only thing annoying about this button is you have to press it several times to turn it off, sometimes pushing it down for a few seconds.

The picture quality suffers from bad black level. Imagine watching a movie that takes place in darkness and instead of the night being black it's gray. I tested a couple of CGI animation and it looked too bright that everything looked washed out. Significant lost of detail was obviously lost in bright scenes. Picture adjustments didn't work too well. Low light settings were way too low that a lot of detail in the picture was lost. Inside light settings provided the picture more sharpness and brightness but edges were exaggerated. Outside settings provided more color to the picture but looked unnatural. Standard was the best picture it provided.

The sound quality sounded equalized, music and dialog sounded clear but there was little or no bass response strong enough to scare you on scenes with guns or explosions. Samsung could have provided a small bass module if they could not fit it in the player's thin body. Not even the headphones could deliver good bass and I was using a studio monitor headphones. There is an audio output so you can hook it up to your Home Theatre setup but who the heck wants to do that on a 12" screen? Good for playing music though. The player's mp3 file supports only 8 characters which is ridiculous. you probably have to rename every file to make it readable on the menu.

You could plug in your game console to this player or plug in your video camera. Samsung provided jacks but not adapters. You can also use it as a stand alone DVD player but no progressive output. Only the built-in screen has this feature. You can view still images in jpeg format. The slide show lags reminds me of an old 486 computer. quality was okay but not better that my LCD monitor on my desk.

Now for the worst part this player still has problems with subtitles. I read some reviews that this was also an issue on their previous models. I looked in the players menu and found that there was no option to turn this off. Options are Automatic only and numerous foreign languages to choose from as a default for the players subtitles to display automatically upon inserting a DVD. Now what's really weird about this is it only happens when the player is plugged in an outlet. But when it runs on battery subtitles remains off. Go figure. A design flaw or maybe just a Korean thing since this player is made in Korea. The Koreans figure it will be very convenient for them since many of them don't speak English. They could have made a Korean version and a US version.

The player plays everything as stated in specs. It doesn't support Video CD. I called their support if there was a firmware that can fix this but the guy responded "NO" and he said it's being phased out. It's too bad if you have a collection of adult movies on VCDS you won't be able to watch them or hard to find titles not on DVD.

I just hope Samsung is listening and fix these problems if they want to be the best. But if you can live with these issues then you will be very happy.

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Comment: Awesome Player Rating:
When I got this player I wasn't expecting a lot. But when I popped in a disc pressed played, I was totally impressed. The sound quality coming from the small speakers is the best I have ever heard form a portable player period. The sound is crisp, clear, music sounds amazingly clear, and the presence of vocals are excellent and never distorted on high volumes. The 12.1" high resolution screen has the best picture quality I've seen in a portable. I'm a very picky guy when it comes to picture quality this one impressed me greatly. It has four adjustments for different lighting conditions which worked very well.
Colors are rich and natural and very bright reminds me of a plasma display.
For this price it's worth it. You won't find a better quality even from a laptop, even the highest models I've seen won't match the quality of this unit both sound and picture. The build is pleasing to the eyes. The design is well thought of. The player supports every major format except DVDRAM no biggie. No one hardly uses that format anyways. It also supports Super Video CD. Plus it comes with a soft dark gray leather case, what a surprise that wasn't mention on the specs. My 11 year old son is constantly asking me to borrow it. Everyone is happy! My friends keeps saying "Cool" Wow! how much is that? If you're shopping for a portable DVD player and looking for quality get this one you won't get disappointed. This player is a keeper

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Comment: Excellent Simple Player Rating:
Bought this unit so that my young daughter could watch her favorite dvds during airplane trips.

So far, this unit does everything that it advertises. Excellent picture clarity, good quality, and overall performs well in bumpy situations. It has two earphone jacks so I can watch Wiggles with her (if I must), and has all the other features one expects from a dvd player.

However, the best feature of this player is that I don't have to do a thing when my 4 year old daughter wants to watch a movie. It's light enough that she carries it around in her Barbie shoulder travel bad, and the controls are simple and familier enough that she can set it up, turn it on, get to the main menu, and play. Try that with a laptop (and I have the small Sony TR3A). All I do is sit there and grin.

Only downside it that even with the headphones, on particularly noisy flights, the volume does not go up high enough to overcome the rather heavy ambient noise found in airplane cabins.

But, my daughter doesn't seem to mind that much, and she enjoys using this thing thoroughly, making for very relaxing trips.

Posted at November 11, 2003 07:59 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)