mustek pl 207 - DVD Players

The Picture is clean and Crisp and the sound superb, mine was already set up as multi-regional from the box but if its not you may need to change it in the factory settings menu. A big thanks to the earlier reviewers that put the right button combination up :)

In-case you missed it, press EJECT, SETUP, MUTE, LAST, NEXT. From here you can change the multi-regoinal setting, switch it to "bypass" for all regions. You can also disable the macro-vision here, which allows you to connect your DVD player up via your VCR (if it has 2 scarts or other connections). I was surpised to find even with this left on auto it worked fine and I was also able to record a DVD to my VCR without having to change the setting at all. A great bonus for those with older Tvs that only have one scart (probably used by the VCR).

I have no problem with some of the other reviewers comments on the disc drawer being rather jerky and not very smooth, mine seemed absolutley fine.

I too was a little sceptical at first, and was tempted to go for a Sony or other well known manafacturer. But I couldnt find any that were multi-regional and still had 5.1 surround. This fits the bill very nicely, it has full 5.1 surround and other things like s-video, RGB etc.. I was pleased to find a few other bits, 4xZoom, 8x Fast Forward and Rewind, and you can stop the DVD at any time, fidle about and resume at the same point without hitting pause, pressing the stop button twice take you back to the very start. With the reduced price of £150 since Jan 2002, this is a steal.

Amazon were great at delivering too, I placed my order on Boxing Day (26th Dec) and it was on my door on the 3rd of Jan, impressive as most of those days were X-mas and New Year holidays.

My YELO arrived within 48hrs of ordering from Amazon. It came complete with S-VHS cable, kettle flex, Scart lead, remote and batteries. The manual is clear enough, though half of it is filled with the obligatory legal consumer health & safety stuff about not eating the batteries or taking a bath with it. But certainly mine was fit for purpose which was to allow me to take my digital videos off the PC onto CD to show to the family via the Living room widescreen TV using cheap CD-Recordables.

The unit is light for its size (mostly air inside) with spaced out little circuit boards to make the unit look bigger than I think it needs to be. But then having previously owned a small DVD player, I prefer my Audio visual equipment to stay still when I press the eject button and not fall out the back of the TV cabinet. The YELO however, is sturdy by virtue of width with a stylish front end and simple to operate buttons. The overall Quality is only marred slightly by the microwave ping through the TV speakers for tray-in/out movement and a bright yellow welcome screen both of which belong on a Kareoke Machine.

The remote is lighter than most (probably the cheapest bit) but has the usual DVD buttons incl 4 speed FWD and REV which Ill probably never use. However, given all the players functional features and range of media playback capability, I had expected picture quality to be sacrificed. But, I was actually surpised by how good both picture and sound quality were. My wife noticed the difference right away. It was distictly sharp and was certainly better than my previous (more expensive) Sharp DVD player which I gave away to a family member on the basis that it only played DVDs. Well, what else do you want it to do?. Tut!

The YELOs Dynamic contrast range is good leaving shadows black and whites bright. Colours are warm and picture holds well in fast action with no bleeding and no noticeable MPEG2 artifacts on fast action or chequered shirts. It even passed my Close-up of Gandalfs beard follicles blowing in the wind test. Nice clear 20-20Khz sound and good separation on both TV and on my Pro-Logic system. I dont have a DTS or 6 channel amp, so cant comment on the DTS. I noticed that the decoded 5.1 outputs include both rear left & right surround and a dedicated subwoofer output. I am still waiting for the catch. Does it melt after 6 months or something?

Theres a range of video outs from SCART, SVHS, RGB (yes, thats one phono socket per colour) and a composite out.

I threw every type of cheap media I could at this unit and it played no problem. Even my VCDs of TV Shows (which look like your average VHS tape when the heads need cleaning) seemed to look clearer. Perhaps theres a special smoothing agent built in to remove those encoding blocks? It didnt screetch or jump tracks once. I even lazily threw a couple of mpeg files onto plain CD-Re-Writable using the standard ISO/UDF format with DVD Quality, SVCD Quality and VCD Quality files (all from the same DVD source) thinking the YELO would get confused about the sudden change in bit-rate and image size between the 3 mpeg files in succession. But, no. It played them all with no problems, only momentarily bringing up its own CD-R file menu before continuing with the next file. It Also played the home-made CD-audio disks cleanly. Makes me wonder if I should throw out my CD Player, as well?

I also gave it an MP3 CD-R disk of a hundred or so files on one CD and some albums in sub-directories and once it recognized the disk type (which takes around 5 seconds) it displays a file manager to show both the files and directories, which you can scroll through or jump-into a directory using play as an enter key. You can choose a titled song or let it go off an play through them.

My only apprehension to the YELO 800 was due to the minority of poor reviews above, the virtually unknown brand name and the cheap price. I had expected a transport system that would fly out on a spring and require manual re-loading. But I was wrong. The transport mechanism retracts quietly and smoothly and the machine is much better than I had anticipated after some of the previous reviews.