Philips DVP-5166K and New Samsung LCD

The government called off work today in celebration of the Muslim Eid Al-Fitr. So I did some errands -- had a customer's full-spread picturebook produced, then went to Western Appliance to pickup our free 22" Samsung Series 4 LCD TV. Samsung has been very aggressive with building their other appliance businesses (aircon, refrigerator) and they have been giving away their LCD TV (the crown jewel of their consumer electronics business) as a come-on. We recently bought a new Samsung refrigerator for the new house and this TV came as a freebie.

To go with the new LCD TV, I bought an entry-level Philips DVP-5166k DVD/CD/DivX/MP3 player. Unlike my previous Philips DVDR3455H recorder/player, this player is more basic. It does not come with a TV tuner and hard-drive for recording or pausing live TV programs. Of course, it also does not have DVD-writing capability. The remote control is more basic. On the plus side, it has new features not found in my DVDR3455H.

These include:

• It is DivX Ultra certified already (my DVDR3455H is just standard DivX certified). So I should be able to playback DivX Author-generated files or DivX Converter concatenated DivX files.
• A Karaoke support scoring feature
• Windows Media Audio (WMA) playback
• Progressive scanning video output
• DivX playback via USB (still have yet to actually try this out)

In the meantime, I installed both the player and the new LCD TV at the kids' room. So Ethan gets to enjoy watching his Dora/Diego cartoons at his room.