Video Asylum

Posted by J_thunders (i) on August 09, 2001 at 13:42:25

In Reply to: Has anyone auditioned this player? posted by Balsac on August 07, 2001 at 07:58:21:

The Roundtable is greatness for video and audio, both. I only have two real beefs with it (or is it beeves?), and a couple a small one's. 1) It is way too much money for what I want to spend in a DVD player, though it does very well as a transport for CD, and 2) IT doesn't play CDRs. While both of these piss me off, this latter difficulty REALLY pisses me off.

My smaller beefs are that it automatically shuts down after a while if it sits idle, it has a panasonic screensaver, DVDs must be super clean, or it won't play them right, the component video outs are locked on 480p, meaning that you are relegated to s-video if you do not have a TV with 480p capability, and finally, the remote is not great--it's not bad, just not great.

I've seriously been considering selling it lately because, as you may have guessed, I cannot use all of the Roundtable's features in my current setup. It's just that I cannot find another DVD player that will perform even adequately as a substitute. I went the other day and test drove the Denon 2800 (runs the same DVDO chipset as the Camelot) and started laughing after about 60 seconds there was so much garbage in the picture. The picture on the Roundtable is just perfect, and when I see other players botch the job, I am glad I have it. I know there are going to be other players out soon that will do well against the Roundtable, just that I don't know of any yet.

I too am waiting for the new shootout to make up my mind on what to do. I have been digging around over at audiovideoscience.com trying to smoke out some tips, but they are just as frustrated as I am, it seems. If you really want to test one out, you can get one from audioadvisor.com, they have a thirty day return policy.