Nissan DV100 review

On the audio side, the player supports Dolby Digital 5.1 and DTS formats. It will also play back MP3 and WMA audio, and we had no trouble playing back either when we burnt them to a CD or played from a memory card. The Nissan did have trouble playing back JPEGs from a Sandisk Memory Stick that we used, but apart from that it worked exactly as it should. And with support for MMC, SD, Smart Media and Memory Stick as well as the more antiquated CompactFlash, nearly every commonly used multimedia format will fit into the Nissan somewhere.

One of the most useful inclusions on the DV100 is the switchable PAL and NTSC outputs. Because Nissan isn't a major manufacturer, its players are easy to make multi-region using a remote control hack -- you just have to know where to look on the Internet. If you decide to do this and then subsequently import an American DVD, the player will not fall victim to the annoying judder of NTSC-PAL conversion. Another great feature for anyone who's serious about their movies.

Our list of problems wasn't long, but the player takes a relatively long time to load up, for up to 10 seconds after you press the power button. You also can't upgrade the firmware on the player itself, which might have been a good idea in case Nissan wanted to add more support for audio and video formats.

Performance
The Nissan DV100 contains so many features at such a low price that a good AV performance might be a bit too much to ask. Certainly, the player isn't quite as detailed as Toshiba's latest, but its component outputs will service a flat screen admirably. The picture is solid when using component or RGB Scart and for DVD movies it's better than you could reasonably expect at the price.

DivX playback also looked just as good as it did from our computer -- it was a noticeable drop in quality over DVD but still very acceptable for TV series. The audio performance was good, but it did lack definition. The cheap components are undoubtedly to blame, but the detrimental affect on audio performance was more noticeable than with video. However, we think it's unlikely that you'll be rigging up such a cheap player to an expensive speaker system.

Edited by Nick Hide