Mustek PL207

Bought this portable DVD player for my 4 year old son in February 2004 after reading many reviews on the net. We travel a lot and have used it with DVDs from any region and zones PAL & NTSC .

It was at that time the best value for money for multiregion & multizone portable DVD.

It has resisted 3 years of intense use (we use it as our home dvd as well) , being handled by a 4 year old and has fallen to the floor many times, being carried around without any special bag ... 3 years later is almost as good as new. I think nowadays the battery is not lasting 2.5 hours as it used to when we first bought it.

A friend has an expensive Philips with a slighlty bigger picture that only reads European DVDs and I don't think it has a better image than our Mustek PL207 .

From the first day I purchased it (new), it never worked correctly. The DVD player would spin the DVD, but never bring up the menu, then it just stopped and did nothing. None of the functions worked! After turning it on and off a few dozen times, the "DVD" icon would finally appear, then the DVD menu would come up. The movie played fine for 1 hour then locked up. I restarted it with the same result. Every other time I have tried to use it, the same spinning, and no reading of the disk occurs. Now it does not work at all.

Mustek PL207 - Bought in October 2004. Used for fortnight holiday then occasional use till end of January 2005.

1.Charger failed - returned. Charger replaced. Feb 2005

2.Then stopped reading discs - returned again and replaced with like for like. Feb 2005

3.Integrated speakers don't work - to be returned

I owned, briefly, two of these Mustek PL207 Portable DVD Players. The first expired after two days light usage, with an accompanying smell of hot plastic, whilst my children were watching a movie in the back of the car. The unit was being powered by the supplied in-car 'cigarette lighter' adaptor at the time.

The replacement lasted a grand total of 1.5 - 2 hours. I was watching a movie with the player sitting on a desk plugged into the mains and, once again, there was a sudden smell of hot/burning plastic and it was dead.

A very frustrating experience as the spec, compatibility and picture quality were excellent. I was able to play multiregion DVD, DVD+R and DVD+RW. I was unable to try further formats due to the brief nature of the relationship!

Hopefully, for Mustek, I was just unfortunate to take delivery of a couple of units from a rogue batch. If not, then this player clearly suffers from a major design fault. Whichever is true, I am certainly not willing to try a third example.