I have a small child and the carousel is great. My Son never touches a DVD, thus never chance damage. I rent 2 or 3 movies and place them in the player, and you enjoy seamless viewing.

It is Sony quality in workmanship.

User interface is poor. REALY BAD. With 200 disks, the menu is important, and this fails in speed, usability, versatility, and esthetics.

Limited CDR and CDRW support (though stated not supported) and limited VCD support.

I bought the Sony DVP-CX850D about a year ago. Over all is has performed as a DVD player well. I have had a 36 XBR TV for about a month and have used the component input, the picture is as expected, great. I never had a DVD that would not play.

My hope a year ago when I purchased it was that most DVD would be text Titled, and this has not come to pass. You must enter the titles into the unit by keyboard or remote. The editing capabilities is small, don’t make a type-o.

The unit has an index capability to sort the DVD. Once you index them it places a picture beside the title, nice feature. The unit can scroll through the disk at about 1 disk per second when indexed. This results in over a 3 minute to move through the full menu (TOO SLOW). I think they are using a Commodore VIC 20 to produce the disk index menu. It is quicker if you do not index them as Action, Sci-Fi, etc, as this adds the picture of the index where the jacket cover goes. I am trying to remove the index, to speed it up.

When I bought the DVD, I was hoping to make VCD from home videos and place them in the unit. This does work, but limited. Home made disks must be written to CDRW or the player will not recognize them. I have read that there are some green and silver CDR that work but I have not been able to make them work.

I burn an Audio CD (CDRW) with Text. The player supports text and shows the title of the disk, not the song, not the artist. If you change tracks on the CD a big blue bar is shown on the TV stating track on the left and blue space to the right. The bar is the full length of the screen, plenty of space for the track title.

I am happy with the player as it performs as a DVD player well. I did get a chuckle out of Sony sending me a notice on the new 300 Disk Carousel. I don’t think I will upgrade until CDR, VCD 2.0, SVCD, XSVCD and FULL TEXT are supported. My next player will have this and an Ethernet port to find the DVD or CD title from the net as well as an HTML interface for programming song play lists.

Bottom line, it is a great DVD player, I expected more, got less, but still a good value.

200 DVDs

Unit is big, can't fit in ordinary stereo cabinet.

This unit is great!!! I have about 40 DVD in it right now. Set-up took a little bit, but it wasn't as hard as some of these reviews might say. The Disc Explorer works fine. It is a bit slow, but it doesn't bother me any. On the average it takes me roughly 20 seconds to turn it on, find the disc I want and start the movie. Overall a great unit for the price I paid.

It holds 200 DVD's.

It does not allow for you to scroll by page through the title list in explorer. Not as easy to select a DVD by number as its 400 CD juke boxes.

I have had this unit for 6 months now. The unit is currently filled to the 200 capacity. The only problem I have with the unit that has not really changed since my last review, is its user interface. The reveiwer below me mensioned that he had no problem with his DVD's. They automatically was noticed by the system and there was no need to go to the explorer for those titles. That may be true, however what he failed to mention is the fact that there is only a few titles with the text on the cd/dvd. I have a total of 220 DVD's and out of the 200 that are in the system I can honestly say that only 30,tops had the CD text and picture. The other 170 I had to enter in the explorer with a keyboard. Now I purchased a Pronto remote and have made macros for all of my DVD's so I do not use the explorer. But my wife sometimes has a problem with using the remote. So she uses the explorer to browse titles. The short coming to this is you can only broswe the titles per line which means after the first 5 titles you can only go done 1 DVD at a time( you can browse by page but it will only display the DVD # and not the title What Good Is That?). When you have about 200 dvd's this can be cumbersome. To be honest with you it would be faster if you selected the title from a rack filled with 200 DVD's (Not as convenient, but definately faster). As far as the button presses are concerned there are just too many just to select a DVD (even by my pronto). In order to select a DVD you would have to 1) Press Display 2) Press the right arrow 3)type in the DVD/CD# 4) Press Enter 5) press display 6) press display again in order to clear the menu screen from the tube. In order to start a cd from any of Sony Juke Boxes you would do as follows 1)press disc 2)select the disc# 3)press enter. Now that makes sence. Unfortunately this unit does not have that conveience. Sony made another peice of crap that is good only to hold DVD's or CD's and that is it. And do not get me started on the Mega controller. Makes absolutely no sence. Why would you want to control another Sony CD player from this DVD player when you will not be able to see the CD's title on the units display nor the TV. Come on people! Lets be for real. The truth is this machine is only good to hold your CD/DVD's and the price is CHEAP. It however falls very short and cannot compete with any other DVD Juke box out there AT ALL. To be honest with you when I can get some extra money together I will buy another brand Jukebox, because this was a very bad choice on my part.

Similar Products Used:

Pioneer DV-606D

Great picture/sound. Easy open front for disk loadings. Holds DVD and CD and DTS music CD's. Audio in for connecting a multi CD changer.

ITS HUGE! Not so tall or wide, but a full 19" deep!!! This unit is hard to come by, so far. Prices should drop as supply is widened.

This was long waited for, but worth it for me. Other than its very large size, this unit is great and I didnt realize I owned 100 DVD's till I loaded them into the unit. But, still room for 100 more. I have a wide mixture, DVD, CD's and DTS DVD's also DTS music CD's. This unit handles them all. Even though you may have to enter manually the DVD title text, it sure beats sorting through and storing 100 DVD's on shelves looking for the one you want. This unit should come with its own insurrance policy, if the unit goes, so does all your DVD's. Originally Sony put a price tag of $999 on this unit. Its good they dropped it since it isnt perfect, but really close!

Similar Products Used:

Sony 650 changer, Panasonic C220.

high storage capacity

somewhat difficult to navigate

this piece of equipment RULES!
it is a necessary for anyone who ownes more than twenty dvds.

Very convenient! 5.1 audio priority, bookmarks

I have only had this player for two weeks but I could never go back to a player that only holds one disc at a time. (or 5 or 6 for that matter) It is very convenient to store my 100+ dvds and not have to get off the couch to change them. I also have several music cds in it. My favorite feature is the bookmarks. You can bookmark a scene in a movie and quickly go there. The bookmark remembers audio and subtitle settings as well.I have noticed no lip sync problems. I would rate both audio and video as excellent.

Holds 200 discs

DVD starts playing,when you turn power on

Like the player so far.It has lots of features. I don't like the way it plays automatic when you power it up,should go to disc explorer first.Sony should of had a option to turn this off

Similar Products Used:

Sony Dvp-550

Excellent Video, VeryGood 16:9 to 4:3 conversion, Excellent array of in's & out's. Ton's of features, Bookmarks, Enhanced BitRate meter, Every disk can have it's own video settings saved. Passes pludge & 0 IRE.

can't daisy chain more 850's thru video. Can't scan disks as one plays. Limited to 16 chars.

Let's remember this is a DVD player first and I wish they would have left off CD play compatability (I want a pure DVD player with no DD decoder no Analog outs no CD play, only component & digital outs). As a straight DVD player the 850's A/V is EXCELLENT. As a mega changer there are a few thing that need improvement. I know as the next generation mega's come out from Sony & Pioneer we'll be wishing we waited. If you are having problems with the 850 playing the last DVD on startup you have to hit stop a second time before shutdown to disable the auto resume feature, or hit the DVD explorer button to stop play back and enter the disk explorer, this feature is great, it's the only one that will stop a disk in the middle of those FBI warnings.

Similar Products Used:

Sony 7700, 7000, Toshiba 9000, 2109, 3006, JVC ????, Pioneer 414.

I really like this player. Holds all my DVD's. I just discovered something new I didnt know before with this player. Even though its a pain to enter the names manually and select a picture icon to go with it, I discovered you only have to do this one time for the DVD's. This unit remembers your DVD name and icon even if you remove the DVD and put it in another slot in the unit. It blanks out the removed slot and displays the DVD's name/icon for that DVD in the new slot you moved to. Thats nice, especially if you loan out DVD's to friends or remove them to play in another player elsewhere. When you return your DVD to the unit, anywhere in the unit, its name and icon will be displayed. You dont have to reenter anything. Iam just surprised so few DVD's have their own icons and names to load in automatically. I've only found ROBOCOP, GHOSTBUSTERS and theres one other lately released (forget the name). Its easy to enter names if you plug in your PC keyboard in the units jack, but on the few DVD's that auto load their title name, you can not edit the name on those DVD's...

Is there anyone else besides me and Neil from Scottsdale who has had their discs scratched and/or broken? When shuttling from one disc to another, the disc dislodges and is then knocked around between the tray and the carousel. (I haven't grouped all my DVDs - about 20 so far - side-by-side, instead leaving open slot spaces between the discs. Perhaps grouping them together would alleviate this problem?) This has happened at least 5 times in the month that I've owned this player. Is there a way to drop the disc from the tray to the carousel without the carousel immediately shuttling to put another disc in the tray? I'm wondering if my player is defective or if it's just something to be expected in such a carousel-tray system.