I've never written a review on this site before, but I did think it was important to put up a warning about this DVD player. I bought one nine months ago. The first sign of trouble came that night, when it stopped playing a disc halfway through. That was a slightly scratched disc, so I thought nothing of it. Weeks went by with no problems, and the return time elapsed.

Then it started getting bad. It often stopped playing in the middle of the disc, often when a new chapter tried to start. This would result in the screen freezing, then displaying digitized static. More often, it wouldn't read discs at all. I would put in the disc, it would whir for half a minute, then it would give up and report "no disc." Sometimes it would load the FBI warning, then crash before the movie or the main menu loaded. This happened about 60% of the time when I put in a new disc. Sometimes I could get it to read if I kept inserting the same disc, sometimes not. Also, the player routinely crashed when... Read more

Tired of anime DVDs which would not work in my PlayStation2, I finally bought the AD500-W and loved it from the beginning :-) This model is rather inexpensive, but its quality is very good overall.

My main concern was that I wanted VCD (VideoCD) capability, which is included in this model. However, in watching the few VCDs I already own, I was a bit disappointed at the occasional skipping, something which did not occcur when viewing VCDs (the MPEG components) on my iMac. Also, for those VCDs with interactive menus, the layout of the remote control is a bit awkward, but still functional.

What is nice is the ability to handle both PAL and NTSC discs, provided the unit is connected to a television which can handle both formats. While I have no use for PAL capability, it was surprising to see such an option in a low-priced model.

While I will likely not use it regularly, the AD500-W also plays MP3s. I burned one of my iTunes playlists as an MP3 disc, and tried it on the... Read more

I thought there was something wrong with the dvd's from the rental place. Half the dvd's that I rented from them didn't play on the Apex. One day, I got a new dvd player, and the dvd's played in the new dvd player. To test, I put the dvd that played in the new dvd into the Apex dvd player and it doesn't read it at all. So, all along, I thought the dvd's were bad, but in fact; it was actually that the Apex dvd player couldn't play many dvd's.