DVD

I bought a new DVD player over the week-end. Do not, for a moment, expect the unit to be state-of-the-art, portable or sleek. It's not. Anyway, I was only interested in the basic features, so I settled for a made-in-China brand you'd normally find in electronic shops in Quiapo.

I entered one appliance shop specializing in China-made TVs, DVDs and videoke machines somewhere in Cubao. The prices were dirt-cheap, almost a steal, so I picked one and asked the keeper to "demonstrate" the features to me.

It turned out the buying experience proved to be more interesting than the unit itself. Immediately, using the remote control, the player refused to open the disc tray. Curiously, the disc trays of the other DVD products on display were the ones that responded to the remote control.

And so I chose another unit with a functioning disc tray, but which, for crying out loud, wouldn't play the sample DVD disc.

I chose another fully-functioning unit with a variety of features I didn't expect from a really cheap unit.

At home, I read the English manual to complete the set-up. I had to tear it into pieces. Yes it was in English, but I couldn't understand it. It's like those machine-generated translations from Babelfish that make no sense whatsoever.

Anyway, I managed to set up and connect the wires to the correct ports, without any explosion (in Macau, I simply turned on the electrical fan in some dingy hotel room and immediately, something exploded). Hey, the signs were in Chinese.

Finally, I was able to watch the documentary on Cecilia Bartoli and the Mozart Violin Sonatas I bought in Quiapo which my DVD drive cannot read. Not bad.