Portable DVD players (1 Viewer)

[Stan]

Totally pointless, but that's what the after-hours area is for

Got this silly catalog from ShopKo in the mail today. Thumbing through it, saw portable DVD players on sale for $58.88.

Back when DVDs started to emerge, the company I worked for decided to put a lot of their sales pitch stuff on DVD, so the person presenting it could let the thing play and answer questions later. Kind of like PowerPoint but all pre-recorded.

I was the IT guy, so it came down to me to find the right equipment. At that time, the little portables were going for around $1600 each and I had to buy ten. $16K, absolutely insane. I actually still have one of them after we retired them, works great.

But OMG, $1600 compared to less than $60 today.

 

[Dennis Nicholls]

I saw some in WalMart the other day for similar prices. Good for keeping the back-seat peanut gallery amused on long trips?

Heck I once paid over $5K apiece for 1GB 8" disc drives for Silicon Graphics workstations I was integrating for the Navy. Time marches on.

 

[Tony Bensley]

I've had 4 different Portable DVD players over a period of several years. The first one from the summer of 2006 had a 8.5 inch screen and video looked great! Unfortunately, though it was a big name brand (Time has erased just which one from my memory bank!), it completely failed the day after Christmas, just shy of 5 months after purchasing! Fortunately, although I had bought this at a U.S. Wal-Mart, our location accepted exchanges, but I had to settle for a different model with a 7 inch screen, as they only had the demonstration model that they weren't allowed to sell. This model in turn, conked out just a couple of months after the 12 month warranty expired. After purchasing one from our local Sears outlet that conked out soon after, I was able to exchange for a better 7 inch Toshiba Model that I was able to get a few years out of. By the time that one pooped out, I decided that enough was enough regarding Portable DVD players, especially as I never seemed to have much luck (Relatively speaking!) with these! I mean when even the usually ever reliable Toshiba brand failed me, come on!

CHEERS!

 

[Stan]

I've had 4 different Portable DVD players over a period of several years. The first one from the summer of 2006 had a 8.5 inch screen and video looked great! Unfortunately, though it was a big name brand (Time has erased just which one from my memory bank!), it completely failed the day after Christmas, just shy of 5 months after purchasing! Fortunately, although I had bought this at a U.S. Wal-Mart, our location accepted exchanges, but I had to settle for a different model with a 7 inch screen, as they only had the demonstration model that they weren't allowed to sell. This model in turn, conked out just a couple of months after the 12 month warranty expired. After purchasing one from our local Sears outlet that conked out soon after, I was able to exchange for a better 7 inch Toshiba Model that I was able to get a few years out of. By the time that one pooped out, I decided that enough was enough regarding Portable DVD players, especially as I never seemed to have much luck (Relatively speaking!) with these! I mean when even the usually ever reliable Toshiba brand failed me, come on!

CHEERS!

That's surprising. I've got several pieces of Toshiba hardware, including my latest laptop. Some of them are approaching 20 years old and still going. My original DVD player is a Toshiba 2109, still running, only issue is no HDMI output port

My first large screen TV was also a Toshiba and I got 18 years out of that,

 

[Tony Bensley]

That's surprising. I've got several pieces of Toshiba hardware, including my latest laptop. Some of them are approaching 20 years old and still going. My original DVD player is a Toshiba 2109, still running, only issue is no HDMI output port

My first large screen TV was also a Toshiba and I got 18 years out of that,

It really surprised me too Stan! We had a Toshiba Monitor style TV that we purchased in the spring of 1994 that was still working in the summer of 2008 that we parted with after we bought another Toshiba that had RCA hookups, that was actually one of the last CRT style TV's that Canadian Tire had. We got rid of that one in 2012 after we upgraded to our current 32 Inch Toshiba Flatscreen.

Yes, we've had a really good run with all of our Toshiba TV's! However, both our first Toshiba DVD Recorder and Portable Player eventually conked out, but to be fair, I did work the DVD Recorder to death to the tune of 1,000s of DVD-Rs! The replacement Recorder has been rather babied, by comparison!

CHEERS!

 

[Scott Merryfield]

I owned a couple of different portable DVD players -- one was a Toshiba and the other a Pioneer. I think I still have one, but have no idea if it still works. It's sitting in the closet in my den... probably next to a portable CD player and portable cassette player.

 

[Stan]

I saw some in WalMart the other day for similar prices. Good for keeping the back-seat peanut gallery amused on long trips?

Heck I once paid over $5K apiece for 1GB 8" disc drives for Silicon Graphics workstations I was integrating for the Navy. Time marches on.

Just as sad, operated a main-frame computer in the late '80s. Had 12MB of memory, one open slot to upgrade to 16MB. $5K for the extra 4MB, and the add-on was huge, Probably a 3 foot x 3 foot circuit board. Now you can add 8GBs or more to a laptop/PC and it fits in the palm of your hand for almost nothing.

Even as we upgraded, I was running servers costing over $100K, with 18-20 hard drives in RAID configurations, with hot swap drives as they inevitably failed.

It's truly amazing to watch technology change.