David Le Page It’s a bit like having a Nu-Metro in your lap, without people kicking your seat or having to breathe under-airconditioned air. The Panasonic DVD-LV75 was the world’s first portable DVD until a couple of months ago – other manufacturers have now started to follow suit. DVD, for the uninitiated, stands for Digital Video Disk or Digital Versatile Disk. It’s the technological successor to the CD but, unlike the CD, currently comes in a variety of subtly different formats, so it’s worth sorting through the details if you have any slightly unusual plans for your DVD system. It allows for a single disk carrying the same movie with soundtracks in a variety of languages, with better-than-CD quality. DVDs are capable of near-studio quality video, depending on the love that goes into their production. It’s a standard already growing far faster than did CDs or video-cassettes when those standards were first launched. The DVD-LV75 is a distinctly impressive – though vastly over-priced – piece of technology.
Essentially, it’s a combination of a DVD player with a cut-down notebook computer style screen and a not particularly catchy name.
Why over-priced? Well, consider, for not much more than the R10E000 the DVD-LV75 will set you back, you could purchase a fully-fledged notebook PC with DVD drive and full-size screen. The basic unit is not much smaller than the standard DVD unit one purchases for a desktop PC (now available for less than R1E000), so Panasonic can hardly argue they invested enormous amounts of time and effort in miniaturising it. At the very least, for the price, it should have been made PC compatible, so that users could plug it into their PCs as an external CD-Rom/DVD-Rom player. However, the LV-75 might be worth your while if you’re considering buying a DVD player for use at home, and are willing to pay a premium for being able to take it on the road as well. For it’s more than capable of making itself perfectly at home in the midst of the most elaborate home theatre system. It has digital video output (which makes for much higher quality on a second larger screen than analogue), a remote control and of course runs quite happily off a mains adaptor.
It also runs as a normal CD player, so it supplants any need for a portable CD player, unless you happen to use yours while jogging. The battery, which fits under the slim main unit, gives close on four hours worth of unplugged watching. Home theatre buffs will be impressed to hear that the LV-75 recognises the DTS Digital Surround audio tracks on many DVDs (the system that has you ducking in cinemas), so choosing the little cousin won’t deprive you of many functions expected from the big. It cannot be said that the little screen on the LV-75 provides a theatre-quality experience. But it is crisp, bright and stable, and only occasionally does one become aware of the pixellation forced on it by the size of the screen. This would seem to be a limitation of current technology, rather than any inherent error in design.
One of the current problems with DVD is that the anal-retentive entertainment corporations have chosen in their wisdom to make disks released in different parts of the world incompatible with players from other parts of the world. So you can be certain of compatibility between players and discs bought in South Africa, Europe, Japan and the Middle East. But if you become a wandering DVD watcher, be careful of asking someone to bring home a new disk release with them from New York, or China, Australasia and the Pacific – the Hollywood control freaks don’t like that. Absolutely the most comprehensive source of information on all things DVD is Jim Taylor’s FAQ at www.videodiscovery.com/ vdyweb/dvd/dvdfaq.html.