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CNET editors' review
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CNET editors' rating:
stars
Very good
Detailed editors' rating
- Reviewed on: 09/11/2001
- Updated on: 01/10/2003
Muscle machine
By itself, the SD-P1500 is an about average-sized portable DVD player--until you strap on the battery pack. Once you do that, you'll add 1.1 pounds to the package, causing the whole thing to tip the scales at 2.9 pounds and doubling its size. For all its mass, the lithium-ion battery doesn't last very long (just more than three hours).
But if you can get past the slightly beefy size and the anemic battery life, the SD-P1500 is a great portable. The 234x480-pixel, 16:9 aspect-ratio screen measures 8 inches diagonally, giving you a lot of picture, and the built-in antialiasing gives this player the best video of any portable DVD player on the market. There is absolutely no pixelization--even on non-16:9-enhanced DVDs. Scenes from Barbarella that showed noticeable jagged edges on other portable DVD players were as smooth as glass on the SD-P1500. The picture remains intact even when you utilize the three levels of zoom. In fact, it's so good that you can watch 2.35:1 aspect-ratio movies zoomed in to fill the screen. The only price you'll pay is a slight reduction in sharpness, but this trade-off is well worth it.
The big picture
Films that are 16:9-enhanced, such as Brazil, look great on the SD-P1500's crisp, active-matrix screen. The display really shines with excellent color balance and no noticeable artifacting. The 10-bit video converter with an antialias filter not only makes the picture on the SD-P1500's LCD screen look fantastic, it also does a great job on a big screen. Thanks to a complete set of composite video, S-Video, and component video connections, the SD-P1500 is very versatile. Hooked up to a Toshiba TN50X81 TV and a Harman Kardon AVR 20 receiver for home-theater tests, the player's redition of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon looked and sounded first-rate with minimal tweaking.
The SD-P1500 doesn't let you adjust the various picture aspects separately. Instead, you'll have quick access to one of five Enhanced Picture Mode presets to control the brightness, the contrast, and the color-level settings. You'll find an enhanced-black-level mode, an animation mode, another labeled Normal, and two separate movie modes. The Enhanced Picture Mode presets are a nice time-saver, and we found the range of settings to be fine for all but the most finicky videophile. Continue reading
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