Thanks to our friends who’s been delivering us DVD players for review, this week we have Philips DVP5980 to see if it’s good of anything. What I knew about it was that it produces high quality outputs for the analog and digital audios and that it plays DivX, JPEG photos, MP3 and WMA files. Everything turned out to be true and considering that DVD players prices are dropping really fast, we’re very happy with it. But let’s get a little deeper and review it.

If one year ago we only dreamed of features such 1080p upscaling on high end products, Philips DVP5980 will cost less than $100 if you find the right place to buy it.

Philips DVP5980 PROs

• USB port that lets you play music, photos and videos from flash memory devices
• HDMI output - you can also use the HD JPEG feature, which lets you view digital photos in their original resolution
• Scart and a electrical digital audio output for Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtracks
• DiVX playback is smooth and stable
• no weaknesses in the bitstream transfer

Philips DVP5980 CONs

• decent sound quality (no the best)
• doesn’t play DVD-RAM
• we’ve seen better 1080p pictures from pricier players

Overall it’s a great product because the quality you buy for that cheap price, is GREAT.

That’s a cool idea someone would say. I find it very interesting too and somehow very simple. Chris Armstrong, the business founder, started wondering about how difficult it is to rent a movie when he spent time in line to get one at a local store in Galway, Ireland. Then he thought to create a company that rents movies on flash memory cards.

The company called PortoMedia has kiosks where people can download movies directly on flash drives. The kiosks will have hard drives that can hold 350 to 5,000 titles. Depending on hardware speeds a movie could be download in less than one minute. PortoMedia will use IBM’s help to develop the transaction system, hard drives from Seagate Technologies, and Samsung’s flash memory devices. Toshiba will fabricate the chips for the high-speed interface.

Armstrong said, its company has signed deals with several retailers from US. The MoviePoint kiosks have already been tested in Dublin at the end of 2007. PortoMedia will sell a proprietary ultra-fast USB interface for customers. A start pack will cost $60 and will include a flash key, a dock, and six movies. Then the customers will use the same flash key to buy other titles from the MoviePoint kiosks. As Armstrong said, the company will establish the future fees for the number of viewings.

Renting movies on flash memory cards will be a great business for movie makers, as well as for the stores. There are many advantages upon DVDs or Blu-Ray discs. First of all, delivering the movies on flash sticks will reduce cost for transporting and packaging the DVDs. Furthermore, the stores won’t have the shelves full of DVDs. Comparing with the Internet downloads, this solution is faster and safer. I hope PortoMedia will be successful in this business.

The original story here.