Dansai 852 (Tesco)

Although the Dansai 852 is a great machine (it does help to have the remote control), i have lost mine and need to get a replacement, any help out there to locate one, i live in manchester if that helps.

Price wise the Dansai 852 is the best buy i've ever made, believe me! I paid £79.99 and i am enjoying every penny of if. This DVD player can only be matched by more expensive models of DVD players.

When I first got the Dansai 852 (Tesco) I was

overjoyed for the budget price of £89.99 it plays anything I put in it :)

you can make it region free, and turn off the macrovision. This was to good to be true !

Now a year down the line I am not so sure :( its stop recognizing certain disks at random also when watching a movie the sound sometimes breaks up and the picture becomes pixalated making it impossible to watch a movie, very frustrating when you have been sat there for over an hour enjoying the movie :(

I suppose it my own fault for buying budget :(

This is a very cheap player. Paid less than 100 Euro. It plays EVERYTHING on ANYTHING. I have tried all kinds of CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, DVD+RW on all kinds of colors. Black, Silver, Green, Blue whatever. I takes it all. Plugged the player to my Sony widescreen tv with a SCART-connection and the picture quality rocks. (Okey it is not THE VERY BEST thing in the world but for less than 100 Euro it is damn good!) I brought a DVD-genie friend over and he took all of his "problem"-DVDs with him, like Lord of the rings, Terminator 2 etc. DVDs that freezed and other funny behaviours on his "expensive" player. All movies but Lord of the rings passed. LOTR freezed at one point. Just pressed play again and it resumed.

I am very pleased with this player and now I am looking for a cheap but good 5:1 sound equitment.

Firstly, for the money, this is a great entry level unit.

It is more that capable of handling the average collection of media including DVD, CDA, VCD, mp3.

The ability to set the output to PAL, NTSC or AUTO is for me an invaluable feature.

Add to this an option to bypass region coding and even to set a specific region (for RCE encoded discs) and you are well on your way. I especially like the ability to select regions 7 and 8, which have not yet been assigned. A little forward thinking and future-proofing here.

There is also the option to switch off macrovision support.

Now for the overheating problem.

This model uses a rather large and Shinawa SHD-2502V drive unit, this takes up all of the vertical space inside the case so not allowing enough air flow laterally. If you look under the drive unit you will see that two of the chips mounted on the underside are covered by a heat-spreader. I found that replacing the thermal paste between the chips and the heat-spreader with a thermal transfer compound having a higher thermal conductivity has helped.

I have not done so but you may find that attaching a heat-synch to the decoder chipset with a thermal-epoxy could improve performance.

Air flow is the key factor to the heat problem here and placing this unit into any kind of enclosed space or stacking system is the worst thing you could do. I needs free flow of air around the case.

Well. Overall this is a very capable unit and gets my thumbs-up (apart from the overheating).

Worthless piece of equip!! Well, concidered the

low price,one couldn't expect better maybe, but

there are a lot of other budget players that are

much better.

This one has so bad picture quality that most

menues on DVD's are unreadable and you have to

guess what you're selecting.

When playing audio discs or MP3's...the whole

player starts to vibrate and generates a loud

hum when the disc is spinning. The hum is so

loud that it can be heard even though the audio

level is at normal level.

The player won't play Lord of the rings, which

my dealer told me was a wellknown problem..

I was given instructions on how to come by this

problems but IF it works you'll have to wait

several minutes (4-5) until the DVD starts

plaing..as I said in the beginning, I would rate

this player as worthless piece of junk !!!

--Lars T.

When I wrote my first review of the dansai 852 DVD player here, I was so impressed by this player; all the formats, the price, the hack for making it region free but most of all macrovision free and so on. My player broke down four months ago and the Swedish reseller (SIBA) say they can't find any spare parts... (Probably a lot of b-s!)

I'm still waiting for it.

I don't have any good advice for anyone on whether to buy one or not. The quality of this player obviously varies a lot. If you are lucky you get a very compatible, Macrovision-free player for a competitive price. On the other hand, if you are unlucky you will get all sorts of problems and a player that corresponds to what you payed.

My rating for "Value for money" is of course based on an assumption that the player works. The "Overall" rating assumes nothing.

I bought my Dansai 852 DVD player as I'd been off sick for a while and deserved a treat so I entered the dvd market totally blind and I can't believe I landed such a good player. It still plays everything I throw at it and I've watched so many films on it. If it messes up I don't know what to do as all Tesco's current dvd players don't read s-vcd or vcd's, so I just hope it carries on working perfectly.

I had the Dansai 852 DVD player for six months and I was very happy with it until suddenly it stopped reading CD_RW. It comes up with (NO-DISC) message when a CD_RW is inserted with any type of data (CD audio, mp3 or vcd). A week later it stopped recognising DVDs. Now it only plays audio CDs. I was hoping for the fun to last a bit longer!

The Dansai 852 is a versatile and excellent DVD player. Why mess with expensive units that are difficult to get region free when this baby (only from tesco's) is in town. I can't fault the playback quality myself. It's only the casing that feels inexpensive. Unless you touch it you wouldn't know that it isn't 'brushed aluminium' would you?

Even has two headphone jacks (never seen that before)!