Plays DVD's "80" percent of the time.

doesnt play DVD's "20" percent of the time

Call me a dummy, i bought the Apex DVD player without doing alittle research on it first. After i brought the DVD player, i read the reviews on it, and was not impress with it at all. The dvd player acts up a lot, sometimes it has a hard time decoding dvd movies such as X files, X men. I had to reload the DVD in order for it to play. I havent tried the Apex to play mp3 nor VCDs yet. If it has a hard time decoding regular DVD movies, i scared to find out how it will decode mp3 or VCDs. I wish i can return it, so dont make the same mistake as me, get yourself a better DVD player, perhaps a toshiba, sony....anything but the APEX.

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First DvD player

Good features... mostly disfunctional (ad703)

DVD player don't play worth sh1t. messes up in the Matrix! of all movies, it messes up the matrix.

bought this cause of it's price and features. ooops.. save yer money, spend 50 more clams on a panasonic, sony or toshiba! no one on the planey has a AD 703/500/600/660, that has every feature working. everyone has problems. the parts are not reliable, and the company is new and doesn't even have a website yet!

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sony, toshiba, panasonic.

DVD Apex AD703
Feature-packed: Built-in 5.1 Dolby Digital Decoder, MP3 Decoder, Audio/Media CD ROM Decoder, 3-CD/DVD Carousel

DVD Apex AD703
Performance: unstable with intermitten interruption during playback, >>No OPTICAL Output for Digital Audio!!<<, slow-loading, cumbersome menu's and remote, no power switch on remote

The DVD Apex 703 comes with all the bells and whistles that can only be found on higher-end DVD Players for less than $200 (plus $20 Apex rebate).

Over-all, the Apex promises alot but FAILS to deliver its key purpose of playing DVDs smoothly.

My recommendation: If you don't mind buying a new car for close to half the normal price knowing that the engine shuts off now-and-again, then the Apex 703 is for you! Otherwise, I would avoid purchasing any 703 DVD player from Apex.

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none at this price

It's the most affordable DVD player out there.

It doesn't really play DVDs. It has no problems with CDs or even Burnt CDs but for some reason it couldn't quite get those DVDs to not skip.

I bought an Apex AD500A for christmas. It was a great deal at $99.99. Well it was a good deal for a DVD player but it couldn't play a DVD. For the first few chapters of all the DVDs I tried it just skipped and couldn't show it. If I was lucky enough to be able to get it to the menu I could skip ahead to the forth chapter and from there on it was smooth sailing, except that the audio had a slight delay compared to the lip movement.
So to sum it up, nice CD player, but no good as a DVD player, so a $100 is a little much for a little tin foil box that can only play single CDs.

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Something by Panasonic

lotta great features ,,, even karoke ( wife'll LOVE that ! ) mp3's,

i waited too long to try one

got it for X mas,, have only had it a feew days ... never owned one, so this is how I feel about it WITHOOUT judging it against others ...

NO problems like those mentioned,, sounds INCREDIBLE on my modest system ( Kenwood VR209, 2x jbl 2600, 2x advent 2 way 6", sony 2x6 cener and Sony 120 watt 12 " sub)

If this is what DVD is all about ... run, dont walk,, to the nearest retailer and get one ! with a 99.00 price, there simply is NO excuse anymore NOT to have your whole house rumble ! very enjoyable ...

This unit,, like other components,, can only be operated PARTIALLY by a "universal" remote .. it shares this headache with all my equipment ... I now have 5 controllers,, I need to buy a Learning remote .... Apex isnt even supported on my Kenwoods remote,, but I dont use the DVD all the time,, so I simply velco it to the outsid of my "rack" and when I wanna watch a movie,, I grab my remote and the popcorn ...

Dont miss outon this feature laden DVD player for a price so low it could get you jailed in at least 14 small countries ..

YOU WONT BE DISSAPOINTED !

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none

The AD-703 it has the ability to keep my boat from drifting(great boat anchor). Also seems to be a good CD player. A lot of features for the price.

The fact that I wasted a half hour out of my day at Circuit City buying this unbelieveable boat anchor. The lack of power and open tray controls on the remote.

Where do I begin? I started to watch Phantasm.......well I still don't know how it ended; and U-571 isn't that about a boat or submarine or somthing? I guess I never made it to the water scenes. I'm suprised that I actually made it past the menus on these two flicks. It looks like this company is using us (the consumer) to test their unfinished R&D products. APEX I think it stands for(A Piece of EXceptional sh*t). Don't you? I think I'll wait until after everyone else returns their AD-703's. I'll bet those return lines will be long and packed with lots of people returning these boat anchors.

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Pioneer Elite DVL-91 Laserdisc/DVD player, Philips DVD751,
and the Pioneer DVC503.

Features, .mp3 compatibility

Non functional units

Bought unit, got it home and it would not power up. Checked cord, connections, outlet, etc...

Returned to Circuit City where I made them open the replacement they were going to exchange (last one in store). That one also would not power on. Was told that, although a bit of a surprise that two in a row didn't work, they had had quite a few of that model returned.

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Phillips, Sony

Mp3 capable, defeats macrovision encoding, plays CDRW media (burnt CDs), defeats regions, plays PAL too.

cheap look & feel, doesn't look like it will last for a year. Heats up quickly. Some lipsynch problems, on many DVD titles.

Do not buy this solely for DVD movie viewing. If you want an MP3 player, with the added feature of watching DVDs, all for $179, this is the way to go.

If you are concerned about DVD quality and stability, go elsewehere.

None.

An engineer in some far eastern country designed and built it.

In Australia this unit is marketed under the Hiteker brand, and it is one helluva piece of crap. I have exchanged this player 4(!) times for a new one, and it's still stuffed. I installed this unit as a second player in a highend system, and have had no end of problems.
1) THE VIDEO QUALITY
Using the S-Video output to a Barco 901HQ projector, this has horrible horizontal scrolling lines across the top half of the screen. (if it was bad on our 14in test monitor, imagine it on a 3.5m by 2m screen). the MPEG artifacts on the Panasonic calibration DVD are really obvious, and the red flares over the black in dark scenes like the bar in Antz. Fast searching just makes the whole screen cut to a colourful mosaic of crap.
2) THE AUDIO QUALITY
Shackled to a Pioneer VSA-E07 amp, the mp3 playback showed a lot of high end sibilance on most files, and the menu is a prick to navigate around. on DVDs the audio is about average, the beach scene in saving private ryan having sufficient bass response on the mortar blasts to sound ok.
3) THE BUILD QUALITY
Thesae and just about every other cheap (sub US$200) DVD player from korea, taiwan, china etc, are based on a cheap IDE DVD-ROM drive and a control/decoder board made by who of all people? ESS!! Everything except the IDE controller and the firmware are controlled by the ESS VideoDrive 1040, one huge SMD IC. Anyone in the computer industry knows ESS are CRAP. the remote feels cheap, and nasty.

overall, the money spent on this unit would be better off putting something like a Pioneer DV-717 on lay away.
i give this 0/0

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Pioneer DV717a, Pioneer DV626, Denon H1500, Sony DVP-S525D, Nakamichi DVD10S

All Region access via secret menu, MP3 Support, DD5.1, DTS, VCD, CDR/CD-RW

The picture quality is pretty bad, lots of digital artifacts in comparison to my Sony DVP-S500D player

With all of its extra features and multi-region support this APEX DVD player makes an excellent second DVD player, but because of the rather poor video quality I cannot recommend purchasing the APEX as a primary DVD player.

This player is rather cheap (about $180) so I'd definitely reccommend picking one up. If you are getting it solely for the multi-region capability, be careful because I have heard that this feature is being disabled in all currently produced APEX AD600A players.

Another player that is a little more expensive (about $250), but has many of the same features (including multi-region support) is the Infinity 2020U. I have not actually tried this one out, but I have heard they are actually the same machine, just with a few different outputs and a different case.

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Sony DVP-S500D