Thursday, June 05, 2008

A tale of five players

Skeeter and I have had an interesting line of experiences with our DVD players.

Being the wannabe techno-geek that he is, he bought one of the early DVD players. One of the multi-disc DVD players. I've never understood those. What kind of lazy person needs three DVDs in at once? At any rate, it was expensive. He never actually confessed how much it was. Not long afterward, he broke it by putting more than one DVD in a slot. As if the three slots wasn't enough already. I have to admit though -- the remote for that DVD player was awesome.

The second DVD player was the same brand, but we slummed it with only one DVD slot. The advantage to having the same brand was that I was able to use Remote #1 with it. Rock on! It was a good DVD player. We used it for at least 8 years, then *poof* it started playing DVDs in black and white. I passed it to a friend who said he could probably fix it. He kept it for 10 months.

So we bought DVD player #3. It worked well for a while, but then it started getting all picky on us. It just simply wouldn't play some movies. "Mulan? Oh, no. I don't think so. But I'll let you watch Annie. Again." I love Annie. Carol Burnett is just brilliant as Miss Hannigan. But I can only watch it so many times before terrible things begin to happen.

Because Player #3 was so picky-picky, we got DVD player #4, a cheap little thing. That player isn't so picky about what plays, but it is horribly picky about scratches. Scratched DVD = freeze-frames. Very distracting. Very. Distracting.

About the time we were thinking about replacing Player #3 or Player #4, the friend brought over a repaired Player #2. Yay! A DVD player that actually plays DVDs! How novel!

All went along well for about a year, then . . . poor old Player #2. He still was fine with playing the DVDs, but he started playing them in black and white again. At that point, Skeeter and I thought that perhaps it was time to give up our old favorite.

After moaning about it for a week or so, we did a search at Circuit City and found one, probably middle-of-the-line, and decided we'd just buy it. And we did.

You know, after all of that, it makes all of us appreciate a DVD player that plays any DVD we want -- and in color!

Noodle4

5 comments:

Vanessa said...

I was late to the DVD party and I've only had two players. The best one actually came free with my car as an incentive. I had no idea I was getting it, it just appeared in the mail about 3 weeks later. Nice surprise!

CelticBuffy said...

I'm still on my first DVD player. We didn't get one until about 2001?. I did inherit a TV/DVD player combo from from folks that the girls keep in their room for movie watching only (no cable allowed in their rooms). I was gifted with a portable DVD player for the vehicle in 2004 but the kids have since worn it out and I don't plan to replace it. It's a little amazing how this device becomes a "necessity" isn't it?!

smalltownme said...

I can't even count. We've upgraded a few times, been given a free one, and tossed a couple that stopped working.

Anonymous said...

I think we've bought five DVD players, total. Of those five, only two of them still work.

Tina said...

We've also had several DVD players...and they ALL seem to get picky at some point. It's a conspiracy! lol