Koss DVP2161 Compact DVD with MP3/CD Player

I bought this player about three months ago, and here's my experience with this unit.

-Design: 4/5. The unit is sharp-looking, with a nice silver chrome finish that's pretty durable. I have the purple "hip hues" version and despite its toy-like appearance it stands up pretty well to wear and tear, and the "psychedelic" look is unique. A point off for the lack of functions on the unit itself; it's pretty much play, stop, a/b view, fast forward and reverse. Everything else is on the remote, which could have matched the look of the unit a bit more.

-Portability: 5/5. Small, sleek and easy to transport. Great if you want a unit that you can easily move from room to room, bring to a friend's place, or, of course, for traveling. Setup with the audio/video outputs (or s-video) is a snap for the majority of televisions and adapters are easy to find for monitors without a/v inputs.

-Picture Quality / Sound: 4/5. Despite some limitations with Dolby 5/1 and surround sound (this won't...Read more

This pint-sized dvd player does almost everything that all the big boys do. This is about one-third the size of a regular dvd. It has a head-phone jack for personal listening. It's very light.

To tell you the truth, when I looked at the brand name I was kind of skeptical to get this player. Usually I'm a Sony guy, but the price and size were right. The picture is just as good as any of the other dvd's I've seen. That goes for the sound as well.

It also has a lot of features not found in other dvd players. One of which, you can select a portion of a scene and view it over and over again by a button called "A-B." Very useful if you want to examine a part very closely without having to rewind then play then stop, then rewind and so forth. Another feature is being able to view a "Scene" over and over again. This baby's got a volume control also within the dvd player. That way you don't have to switch between controllers so much. It's also NTSC/PAL compliant and VCD 2.0 compatible...Read more

In short: this item is so bad that I'm actually amazed that Amazon is carrying it. In fact, giving it one star is far too generous! Sure, the price is alluring, but please -- PLEASE! -- read the overwhelming number of other negative reviews regarding this item and believe them. I have an extensive (and scrupulously tended) DVD collection (i.e., no scratches, no duds), yet the Koss unit has trouble regarding 9 out 10 discs it's asked to read. The picutre either drops out completely (leaving the tell-tale blue screen) or simply freezes on whatever image in on screen at the time. No amount of coaxing or encouraging will solve this problem. One wonders how, in good conscience, Koss could release this dismal piece of engineering. I've seen much better units in electronics stores for less -- do a little searching and your extra effort will be repaid handsomely that way. If you don't want to feel frustrated or foolish (for having paid money for this piece of junk), save your money and go...Read more