Price Paid:  $600.00 from from friend

Summary:
I picked up this unit solely for housing my ever growing collection of dvd's.I picked it up from a friend who works at a sterio shop, so at the price i paid it was hard to refuse, but should i have?? Installation was simple, and the manual was decent. The first Dvd's i tried was Final fantasy, and Toy Story, because of their pure digital nature i though it would give the best quality indicator. Imediately i noticed a flicker problem with scenes consisting of white backgrounds, and dark foreground material, as with dark background and white foreground material. ( basically scenes with an drastic color differential)The flicker seemed to be worst at the top of the picture, and less at the bottom, This is most certainly the infamous Croma Bug, as in a lot of dvd players these days, as i did not have any problem with my old toshiba 3750 player, i am using Monster component cables, with a toshiba 57HX81 HDTV. On the plus side, the sound output is some of the best i have every heard, dts output was especially nice, as is the large capacity. The software is not bad, but i wish Kenwood would integrate an online DVD database, as manual input is tedious at best. All in All a mixed bag. But the video problem is just to much to ignore, with progressive turned off, this flicker problem does go away, but i refuse to have to make this sacrifice.. At $600 (canadian to boot) its still a steal, but a Retail price of $700-1000 american. its just not worth it. get the Kenwood 5900m changer, with the advanced Faroudja Progressive scan chip.

Strengths:
Sound output Huge capacity Interesting software ( which i hope they upgrade soon)

Weaknesses:
Progressive scan output (flicker) Poor Remote.

Similar Products Used:
None

Price Paid:  $799.00 from ebay retailer

Summary:
I couldn''t wait until someone made a unit that did all that this one does. Now I can''t wait until someone else makes one that will do all of these things better! For some strange reason, Kenwood put a unit into production that will only read the first 8 characters of an mp3 track file. What the heck were they thinking??? When you are trying to browse the contents of the disk (100+ tracks), all you get are garbled descriptions like Beatle~1.mp3, Beatle~2.mp3 etc. This unit does have the capability to name tracks, but it is very cumbersome and you can only name up to 20 tracks per disk! HELLO KENWOOD!!! An mp3 disk can easily hold 150 tracks of high quality sound!!!!! I really don''t understand what they were thinking!!! And if you move that disk or re-write it and change the order of the tracks, guess what? You get to reprogram the unit again. Also: You can’t use random play on an mp3 disk. Every time you power the unit on, it scans all 400 disks which means you have to wait about 1 minute before you can do what you want. This is EVERY TIME. Even if you haven''t opened the door or changed disks. If you like to program the order in which songs play back don''t plan on doing it with your mp3s...... it doesn''t support that!! Unfortunately, Kenwood obviously didn''t put much importance on functions that are pretty standard with today''s technology.

Strengths:
large capasity. dvd, cd, mp3 in one unit.

Weaknesses:
Many!!!

Similar Products Used:
This is a one of kind unit.

Price Paid:  $549.00 from Military Exchange

Summary:
Nice 400 disc changer. Great video, but have noticed a 2-3 second lag on some layer changes. Quiet operation. I loaded up about 350 discs, it took about 2 hours to read them all, connected to the database, and had most of them labeled in memory in about 20 minutes! The default display is for song titles, and must be changed each time for artist name display. The remote is terrible, small buttons, some gray labeled with white, and unreadable. Pretty quick access for random play. The Kenwood software is first generation, but for what else is available, not bad. All in all, pretty good, but good luck teaching your wife to use it!

Strengths:
Big capacity Quiet operation

Weaknesses:
Remote control NON-existant Kenwood tech support

Similar Products Used:
Pioneer, other Kenwood