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Gift Guide for Flightsimmers
Take your movies on the road with this cool portable DVD player from eDimensionalBy Cap Mason, Flight Simulation Editor
The holidays are creeping up on us, flightsimmers.
Although, as I sweat through this Indian Summer heat wave in San Francisco with
the temperatures in the 90s, you would hardly know it. In any event, the
holidays will be here soon enough, along with cooler weather. I'm going to be
bringing you reviews of various products that I think would be very cool gifts
for flightsimmers. This is the first in that series.
Saving my sanity with portable DVD technology
As I write this, I am watching my favorite DVD of all time, Apocalypse
Now, on this very cool, very small yet powerful, portable DVD player that's sitting
on my desk. It's the Mustek PL207 and it's a lot of fun. In fact, it saved my
sanity recently. My wife shanghaied me into joining her at a meeting of the San
Francisco Planning Commission to protest some incredibly stupid stuff The City
has in mind. If any of you have ever been involved in local politics, you know
how intensely boring those commission meetings can be. San Francisco Planning
Commission meetings are boredom on steroids! So, to get through it all, and stay
rational, I brought along this DVD player and a stack of Discovery Wings DVDs.
The meeting went over 5 hours! I got through the entire 4-DVD collection of the Wings
American Pride Collection plus Red October. It wasn't such a painful experience after all, thanks to portable DVD
technology. And, those DVDs are all great. I'll be reviewing them separately as
part of this Gift Guide series.
Saving $50 on a great gizmo at a great price
Portable DVD players have been around for awhile. But I have
never seen one this good, with this big of a screen, at this low a price.
Normally priced around $350 to over $800, eDimensional has scored a great deal on the Mustek
PL207 and is passing it on exclusively to FlightSim.Com members for just
$299.95. That's a $50 savings.
The perfect traveling companion
If you do a lot of traveling, you'll love having your own personal DVD player. I do a lot of flying on either Southwest or Jet Blue. Even with the built-in TV screens on Jet Blue, I find that the programming for in-flight TV is very lame. And, the in-flight movies shown on other carriers are always either films that I have already seen, or those that I would never want to see. I always travel with my Dell Inspiron laptop but it's not one of the new Centrino models with extended battery life. So, I save the laptop battery for work and never have enough power to play a DVD for its entire run time. Now, when my laptop battery finally dies after a couple of hours, I still have 2.5 hours of DVD movie power in the Mustek player.
What's more, the whole thing is tiny. Even
with its large, 7-inch wide screen, and battery pack, it weighs only 700 grams, is razor thin, and
literally fits in the palm of my hand. It fits perfectly on the airliner tray
table and doesn't get shoved off when the passenger in front of me reclines the
seat.
Good looks and great specs in one sleek, compact design
Before I get into all the technical specs, let's take a look at the video and sound quality. That's where the rubber meets the road in DVD players. Most of the other low-cost models I looked at had tiny little screens, lousy video quality and even worse sound quality. The Mustek PL207 is a pleasant surprise. Its 7-inch LCD display looks great and is actually big enough to make watching it a pleasant experience. This portable DVD player displays crisp, color-balanced images in any light. The large Color and Brightness control knobs make it easy to adjust for various ambient lighting conditions. Plus, the LCD is viewable from a very wide angle.
It comes with a lightweight, almost invisible earbud stereo headphone or, you can listen through the built-in stereo speakers. The player also comes with a handy, credit card sized remote, AC power pack and rechargeable removable battery pack. There's a DC adapter for your car so you can run it for extended periods and keep the kids amused on those long road trips. It also has a stereo video patch cable to connect the DVD player to external video devices.
It's a nice, neat, complete package that even
looks good. The Mustek PL207 all adds up to an outstanding price-performance
value that you don't even find
with portable DVD players that cost up to twice as much. For just $299.95,
this gizmo is a real bargain. All you have to add are the
DVDs.
Time to indulge my second favorite pastime (after flightsimming, of course)
I have used this tiny marvel to show DVDs of flightsim action that I captured right off my desktop. It's also handy for playing video demos, slide shows, commercials, tutorials, music videos, music CDs and just about anything else that you can see or listen to as long as you can play it back in one of the many multimedia formats this device handles.
OK, I'll confess. Your intrepid author is a passionate film fan. Now, while I have used the Mustek player for business, my real passion is watching movies. Next to flightsimming, watching great films is my second favorite pastime. Now, with this portable player, I can go to the movies anytime, any place. Truth be told, I have even been known to slip the player on top of my laptop, wear the undetectable earbud headphones, and catch a quick movie or music video clip during boring meetings. But, please keep my secret and don't ever tell the client the meeting was that useless!
While compiling this review, I started out by feasting my eyes and ears on my favorite films including the Discovery Wings series, Apocalypse Now, Aliens, Dr. Strangelove, Forbidden Planet and TORA TORA TORA.
I finally turned my attention to one of the all time best flying movies,
Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor. The mini-widescreen did this visual
blockbuster justice, no doubt about it. Although, I must admit, that when viewed
side-by-side, I tend to prefer the aerial scenes in
TORA
TORA TORA to Pearl Harbor. For me, the fact that TORA
TORA TORA used actual aircraft, flown by real pilots for most of the flight
scenes just looks and feels better than the computer graphics extravaganza in Pearl Harbor.
IJN Zero Ace, Saburo Sakai, was one of the aviation technical advisors on this
1970 production. Watch the clips on the right, side-by-side, and you'll see what I'm talking
about.
Sounds as great as it looks
The stereo sound is excellent when you listen through headphones. The Mustek DVD player accepts any standard stereo headphone or headphone & microphone headset. The one area where this DVD player comes up a tad short is when you listen using the built-in stereo speakers. The sound fidelity is a little tinny-sounding through the speakers. For me, that was an acceptable compromise to get so much movie power for so few bucks. After all, while I may love the movies, the people around me probably find the noise an unpleasant distraction. So, I almost always use the player with headphones. Plug then in and the audio experience is sublime.
Good audio is especially evident when watching a DVD such as Apocalypse Now. Francis
Ford Coppola created a sound extravaganza with this film that is truly a feast
for the ears. The ominous rumbling of the arclight B-52 raid, the staccato chop
and whine of the Air Cav Hueys, the sound of hot brass dancing off the deck plates from the
M-60s, the whump and crash of explosions and weapons fire, plus the fabulous
musical score that ranges from the Doors to the Rolling Stones to Wagner -- all
come thrillingly alive when played through your headphones on this tiny powerhouse
of DVD entertainment. Lock and load and listen!
Dolby headphone soundtrack magic
The Pearl Harbor DVD has a unique sound feature made
especially for headphone users that I thought I would try out with this player.
It's called the Dolby Headphone Soundtrack and was created especially for Pearl
Harbor. Dolby Headphone creates the sonic illusion of Dolby 5.1 channel
surround sound on any headphones. It played back marvelously on the Mustek DVD
player.
Easy to handle, easy to play
All the controls are logically laid out. You can instantly access all the functions from the keypad and navigate all the DVD features. The credit card sized remote control is a very handy gizmo especially when you're hunting Easter Eggs on your DVDs.
The LCD display instantly switches between all
the different video screen formats including movie letterbox, 16:9 and TV. It
also handles multiple video formats including NTSC and PAL. You can play a
myriad of
compact disc media including DVD,
VCD, SVCD, DVCD, CD, MP3, CD-R, CD-RW.
Video: DVD Playback, Kodak picture CD compatible & JPEG readable 
