Philips DVP5960 DVD Player With HDMI / DivX

The last reviewer is absolutely right, out of the box this is a somewhat disappointing performer - however, if you look on the Philips website you can download a firmware update - just burn it to a disc, pop it into the drive and the rest the player does for itself. Aferwards the player really comes into its own, the firmware update addresses upscaling issues via HDMI - it looks fantastic now!!!

RECOMMENDED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The USB port at the front also lets you watch movies from it as long as the device is formatted to FAT32 (portable or Hard drive) It is a fantastic player.

I purchased this player last year to take advantage of the HDMI connection on a new HD TV that I had bought. (HDMI cable needs to be purchased separately). With the format war of HD and Blue-ray still going on, I think this was a justified purchase. Granted, you won't get a true HD picture, but an upscaled one at 1080i is a good start. The upscaled picture is crisp with good clarity and has a decent enough sound through Dolby Digital.

There is a USB port that supports HD Jpeg, audio and video playback. Menus are pretty straight forward to navigate through, and there are some decent features to tweak with to achieve an optimum viewing experience. There is an update available via the Philips website if you don't have the latest firmware and the player can be made region free as explained by another reviewer on here.

There are a couple of negative points. Firstly, when playing downloaded movies from a flash drive (fat32) via the USB port, it exposed a problem. The player can't seem to handle a lot of movement on screen at once. An example is snow or long grass blowing about. This resulted in the picture stuttering. However, most movies played fine and this feature on the whole is an asset to the player. My main point of concern is with the clumsy remote control. It is pretty flimsy and non - responsive at times, which left me frustrated when I'm pressing the play button and nothing is happening! What I found was that if you aim the control more directly at the unit and push the buttons a lot harder than you normally would, it reacts better.

Overall, I highly recommend this player, particularly because of its affordability, many features and its ability to give a new lease of life to your standard DVD collection.

This wee bueaty has alot of features and it realy does upscale the dvd`s, you will see the difference straight away and what the description dosent mention, it has a USB port at the front which is handy for music. First Class for the price tag.

I've had this DVD player for a while now and I'm not 100% happy with it.

The DVD player itself is pretty nice looking. The HDMI upscaling is pretty good as well.

However, the issues I have with this player is it's ability, or inability to play certain DVDs. It constantly skips all the way through my Alien Quadrilogy DVDs, there are no scratches on the discs and they work perfectly fine on both my Xbox 360 Elite and on the DVD player downstairs.

This player also has issues with my Friday DVD, it won't let you select anything on the front menu. You actually need to bring up the chapter selection via the remote and select a chapter in order to get the film to play.

Also, the remote itself is pretty poor, it's very unresponsive when pressing buttons, sometimes you've pretty much got to move really close to the player to get it to work.

Despite my 'hammering' of this player, it is pretty good, but because of the problems I've encountered I've been left quite dissapointed.