I have used this player for over 6yrs. I have had to replace lost lines of information after playing a selection.
I have used the disc explorer to help locate a dvd. The Explorer will locate from three files....numeric, alphabetic or from categories. I have used the picture saved... to the folder....most beneficial with 52" veiwing. Sound and picture quality are superb. I used a mini keyboard to help simplify data input. I've set mine to turn itself off after a period of inactivity. Will play all except unfinalized disc. Connected to a Sony HT system. This player is quiet and easy to use.

Absoutely NONE

Everything you could think of, and trying to figure out how to fix or replace about 2 dozen or more DVD's

This player SUCKS, a waste of time and money. Not to forget, it SHREDS DVD's! I was excited to finally purchase this unit, thinking I'd eventually have enough room to play all my DVD collection.

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My older 200 DVD unit has worked perfectly four years running.

$200 less than the Pioneer. Progressive scan.

Interface sucks. Huge.

Thanks to the dire warnings in reviews like these, I purchased this item with low expectations. I chose a local retailer instead of an online one because I knew I might want to return it. Got a floor model for $345, so I was satisfied with the price. One reviewer mentioned that he avoided the Disc Explorer entirely by typing up a list and accessing discs by disc number only. I took his advice, and after a cursory look at the Disc Explorer I haven't used it since. Sony screwed up here, but the rest of the player is great. (It's inexplicable why Sony designed the Disc Explorer the way they did. It shows only 5 titles at a time, you can't page down and it doesn't load titles automatically from most discs. It's really terrible. WTF, Sony?) If the remote had a jog dial so I could dial up a disc number, I'd be in heaven. As it is, I use the +/- keys or press "Folder", then type in the disc number, enter, enter. This works fine. I'm happy with the disc-loading speed. What I'm most thrilled with is that it plays all my DVD+R home movies perfectly. Whew. Didn't know whether they'd play when I bought it. Having 20 years of my life on deck changes everything. I can go to my kids' birthdays, Christmas of any year or specific vacation memories in seconds. Without a player like this, most home video lies unwatched and even if you pop a tape in, you can't locate anything quickly. With everything transferred to DVD and loaded in a jukebox, I can finally really use my home movies. Same with my complete Monty Python and Seinfeld sets. If you want to put on The Argument Sketch or The Contest, you can go right to it. Oh, and children are incapable of putting DVDs back in their cases. Problem solved. One nightmare I read about but didn't have was scratched discs. My player is fine in this regard. My wife asked my why I bought it if it had so many annoying problems. Here's the deal: 1. This player costs $200 less than the Pioneer. 2. This player is progressive scan. 3. The Pioneer is much older. 4. It does what it's supposed to do. I can't comment on the picture or audio quality since I'm not a videophile or audiophile anymore. I have the thing plugged directly into a 27" tv, not even stereo. But I'm sure if I get a plasma tv and hook it into a surround system it'll be awesome. My wife is happy it plays CDs. She rarely listened to CDs before because it was too much trouble to find them and put them on the player. Now, she can just dial up (on the player) what she wants and press Play. Buy one and work around the shortcomings. It'll change your life.

Tons of connections on the rear, comprehensive remote.

read above. im overall pretty disappointed with this unit.

I wish I had spent the time reading reviews, instead of months dreaming and waiting for my tax refund to arrive. The engineers who designed the disc management interface, I am positive, never tried it in operation. It's the most unintuitive design ive ever seen. Ask yourself this: if you own 400 DVDs (and want them all in one player), do you want to only see 5 of them at a time? If you own enough dvds to justify a 400 disc changer, then the probabability of that person owning a 32" or larger tv is also quit high, therefore sacrificing all the unused space for simple movie titles and getting about 20 per screen would seem a logical choice. Once you have all your movies programed in, scrolling your 5 movies at a time is such a time waster. When you click down one movie, it has to redraw all the previous screenshots for each movie. Another gripe of mine, is that movies are not selectable (by name) outside the teeth pulling disc explorer. I have a sony 300 disc cd changer (that I bought at the same time as my dvd changer) that once the names of discs are programmed in, the jog dial scrolls the names on the front panel as fast as I can turn the dial. This is by far the easiest way to quickly find what you want to hear. The title of the movie is only visible on the units front screen once the movie is being played, and then only if you hit a button to make it appear for a moment. Worthless. I seriously can stand in front of my entire libraries shelf and pic a movie and insert it into a single disc player, faster than you can search and select a movie in this unintuitive machine. Tomorrow im going to make a giant text file of the movies in the machine corresponding to what slot, and print it and tack it to the wall next to my DVPCX985V. Reading them off the wall to find the movie appears to be a better (or at least, more useful) technology than what i just paid $400 for.

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other sony mega changers.

Good value. Decent picture. SACD compatibility.

Slow operation times. Keyboard text entry. Depth of unit doesn't easily fit many A/V stands.

Best current solution for massive libraries. Wish I could daisy chain 2 or 3 together.

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Literally nearly 100 other DVD players.

Features. DVD/CD/SACD - CD/CDR/CDRW/DVDRW Lots of formats 400 Disc Changer

User interface is terrible Unit is slow to respond. Need to use the onscreen menus No front/remote button for shuffle Need 5.1 analog input to use SACD

I was looking for a DVD player which could handle the new computer formats when I stumbled upon this unit. It had all the features I was looking for with SACD thrown in for good measure. I purchased the unit shortly after it was released. My experience with the unit has been mixed. From a functionality standpoint, it does everything I need. From a useability standpoint, there are some real issues with the unit. The most painful observation is that the response time of the unit is terrible. Press a button and wait. Most of the other reviews have talked about the need to manually enter information about CD's or DVD's. This is an issue, but the keyboard input helps greatly with this process. I'm personally very annoyed at the inability to access the artist field from the labeling menu. Only if the CD has CD-text is the author field is displayed. I listen to a lot of classical music where the composer, title, and performer are all critical for distinguishing one CD from another. The few characters provided in the one line entry are rather difficult to work with. Another feature I feel is poorly implemented is shuffle play. It has a tremendous strength in that the shuffle play works within a user specified group called a folder, but it's strentth ends there. To enter shuffle play mode, you first need to start a disk playing, then walk through 12 distince keystrokes in the on-screen menu to find the track shuffle button. Yuk. Also, every time the unit switches, it resets to displaying the track time rather than showing the title information. This is rather annoying if you can't identify every CD by listening to it. When I got the unit I was rather excited to compare the regular CD sound to SACD, however, I have learned that the SACD sound comes out the pre-split 5.1 ports, and my integrated amp only has digital or L/R analog inputs. The user manual for the unit is a must because the unit inself is rather obtuse. Any time I want to add, subtract, edit, or otherwise manage a disk, I keep having to pull out the manual and re-read it. I'm starting to go through all the work of taking every CD I own, copy them with the insertion of CD text, just so I can load the disc and not have to worry about managing the CD information in the player itself. My Setup: Nakamichi IA-1Z Integrated Amp Nakamichi PA1 Power Amp Magenaplanar MG3.6 Front Speakers Custom Built Subswoofers

- Large capacity - Format capabilities (VCD, SVCD, DVD-R, MP3, SACD, etc...) - On-Screen Disc Explorer (Although a bit slow) - Picture and audio quality

- Cannot randomly play discs by Genre. (can play randomly within a folder though) - Only 4 custom folders for sorting discs - somewhat slow switching discs, but when you have 400 in there... who cares :) - The manual does a good job with explaining set-up, but does not show you have to randomly play discs within a folder, although not too difficult to figure out. - Will NOT sort VCD's alphabetically, and if a DVD is inserted AFTER a VCD, it will not sort the DVD by Title either. - will probably only detect the names for about 5-10% of the discs. Manual entry will be required.

Well My experience with this player began as a BAD ONE. I brought the player home, set everything up. Spent Hours typing in all the disc titles (the Auto-Load only identified about 20 discs out of 140 DVD's and about 150 Audio CD's). The external keyboard capability is a must and works very well. Please ensure that BEFORE you load your discs, you write down the Title and/or artist for entry. I have found a bug though: If you plan to play VCD's you may want to read this part. The disc explorer has the ability to sort discs alphabeticaly by title. It will NOT sort VCD's, nor will it sort DVD's that are placed in the machine after the VCD's/SVCD's. Long story short... Put the VCD's in the machine LAST. (I use slots 350+ for my vcd's. After the set-up was completed, the unit began deleting titles and changing some of my set-up options? Turned out to be a bad unit. I've replaced it with a new one, set everything up and am now quite satisfied. The Disc Explorer is quite slow, but a useful feature. Picture quality and audio quality are top notch. The SACD feature is interesting, however the audio can NOT be output from the digital connections. You must use the internal 5.1 decoder outputs to get the multi-channel sound. I've thrown VCD's, SVCD's, DVD-R's and MP3's at this and has done well with everything. The VCD Playback is not quite a sgood as the Pioneer line, but is superior in all other areas. All in all this is a great player for the money and a great addition to any home theatre system.

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Sony 200 Disc CD changer. Pioneer DV-444 DVD Player Onkyo reciever (6.1) Athena AS-F2 (AWESOME SPEAKERS) Athena C1 Center Channel (Love it) etc..

Great features (DVD,DVD-R,DVD+R,VCD,CD,SACD playback) for the price.

Progressive scan LED not working. No disc playback while loading in or removing other discs.

Great to get all my DVD's out of the cabinet and into a 400 disc mega player. Each available by selecting off the 'Folder' menu. I sorted my DVD's by kids, Drama, Action Adventure and Musicals. Left the 300 - 400 positions for regular CDs and SACDs. Progressive scan works good on this unit outputing to my HD set however my progressive scan LED on the front panel never lights. Maybe it's blown out LED, because progressive IS working. The SACD's sound great and Sony included a Bob Dylan SACD with the unit. His strange vocal style still sounds just as strange on SACD! Video quality is excellent and I don't feel like I'm geting ripped off on quality by having a mega changer.

400 Disc capacity, DVD, DVD-RW, Audio CD, Video Cd, Music Cd, Keyboard input, well written manual

None found yet other than poor advertising as far as having a keyboard input

I've been reading reviews on dvd changers for a month now and wasn't convinced it was time to purchase one yet. There seems to be something wrong or missing with each and every one and then I came accross the new Sony DVP-CX985V in a weekly at Circuit City. It was time to go shopping and clean out my video cabinet. Now, where to install it took about 10 minutes, out came the Laser disc player and the Sony Super Beta. Then the man thing took over, set everything up and then read the manual as need be, (and you will have to read it). I hooked up a wireless keyboard to the front and prepared to have the wife catolog every disc, after all there was a football game on, but she didn't understand any part of this. The load button on the player identified half of the discs that were installed and I had to do the rest manually, seems there is no common way that the dvd discs are made either, so after about an hour the 60 dvd's that I loaded in the player were all ready to go. I must have switched dvd's 30 times to identify and catalog them and the player loaded them flawlessly, so far so good. I must say I was impressed with Sony's "Explorer" catalog system (not having anything else to compare it to) other than a computer. I decided to hook up both the stereo and optical audio connections so the wife could play audio cd's easily and when watching a movie we could switch to an external 5.1 decoder which worked out well in my multi amp configuration. Overall set up was time consuming (as expected), picture and sound quality is excellent, and the reliabilty is yet to be known. For the cost verse's features the Sony DVD-CX985V offers I would say they built a winner!

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None

Large capacity (holds 400),Plays SACD and mutitude of other formats.(MP3,DVD-R,DVD-RW,CD-R,-CD-RW ETC.)

No S-link or Mega connection.

Purchased the new Sony 400 DVD player(DVPCX985V)because my 301 DVD player(DVPCX870D)is full.I've never had problems with Sony Products. All my audio units are Sony. I have a 300 CD player,a 301 DVD player(DVPCX870D)and Receiver (STRDE935).So far I have no complaints with the 400 unit player.

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Sony DVP-CX870D- 301