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are the players that bad? >>
Well, I think so. They give very interesting colour shifts in blacks which I have never noticed on any other player. I have been told that the reason for this is that the Apex uses minimal filtering for the video which is theoretically a good thing for some people. But on my TV it looks like absolute crap. In the movie Contact, there is a scene where Ellie is getting briefed before she goes on her trip. She's wearing a black sweater. Well, on my RCA it's a smooth gradation of colour on the sweater but if you look very closely there are shades of dark green. However, I never noticed this until I played Contact on my Apex. Suddenly large patches of green were jumping all over her shirt. Very interesting.
Second, many movies don't play properly. Most of that problem is due to the mastering of the disc, but still, these discs usually play fine in my RCA. While in most cases I can just resume or skip over the problem area with the Apex, it's VERY irritating.
Third, the heatsinks on the unit were not designed very well. In fact, it doesn't really have any. It just has this bent sheet of metal touching the "CPU", but just barely. My unit gets very warm, but there have been overheating problems with some.
Just so you know, the Apex is a strange little machine... I took mine apart, and it actually is just an IDE DVD-ROM drive. I am guessing, but I think other DVD players are not built this way. I think it's a 5X or 6X DVD and it even does digital audio extraction (DAE) pretty well. I know, because I plugged it into my PC and it works fine with the built in Windows 98 drivers!
The firmware is flashable too by the way. People on the net have done it.
Now, I have one of the earlier ones with the removable region code and macrovision. That's why I bought it - so I could buy discs other than those in N.A. Plus, the auto PAL->NTSC conversion is a bonus. The current ones might be better, but they don't have these "features" any more. If you're at all serious about your DVD, get something like a Panasonic or Toshiba. Of you've got lots of dough to spend, but a progressive scan DVD with progressive scan TV.
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