I’ll lay it straight on the line. I’m baffled by portable DVD players. Not Sony’s in particular, but just portable DVD players in general. Why? Because they do nothing a laptop can’t do. Sure, laptops cost more, but not a lot more now days. A few hundred dollars on top of the $299 RRP for this particular portable DVD player and you have yourself a lappie. That is if you don’t already have one.

The major question must be “who needs a portable DVD player?” Road warriors? No. They carry around laptops and other small gadgets. Uni students? No. They have iPods, Zens and other things they can throw in their pocket and that have a battery life in the double digits. And a laptop as well usually. School kids? Perhaps for their rooms. But portable DVD players generally don’t have tuners. So they are only good for DVD. And school kids use computers so much now days, it would be more sensible to spend the money on a computer. A lot of schools are, in fact, making them compulsory. Parents? Yes. This is the only reason I can think of anyone needing a portable DVD player. Parents that travel a lot with their kids. Kids who don’t get travel sickness I might add. Stick it in the centre console of your car, use the car power pack, and the back seat has instant entertainment. Of course, if you happen to be a parent with a small laptop, this will do the trick just as well.

OK, now that we know there is a very small segment of the market that actually requires a product like this, how good is it? It’s good. Not great. It does what it says it will do, but there are a few improvements that could be made.

The DVP-FX720W is a bit of a chunky monkey to start with. It’s certainly no MacBook Air size wise. At around 3cm thick there’s plenty of air inside. The battery is actually attached to the outside of the player on the bottom. Annoyingly this makes it a thicker product than it should be.