Rating: 
Summary: Bad Design and Bad quality print
Review: I bought this DVD player thinking that it's great value for the price with all the functionalities.
But I am not satisfied with the picture quality, since it has distorted images often. Also one of the movies that I played on it had brighteness changing from dark to light throughout the movie. Also the it takes a long time for the power to turn on.
Rating: 
Summary: Not user friendly, there are better choices
Review: I bought this player at Costco under the CV-37 model number. It immediately aggravated me with an extremely poor user interface. The remote is difficult to use, and there are virtually no buttons on the unit. It takes 5 seconds for the unit to "boot up" to where it will take a command (like "disc skip" or "open tray"). I was also amazed at how difficult it was to play a CD on random play. It requires an arcane sequence of button pushes on the remote that you will surely forget between uses (and I am an electrical engineer).
I just took mine back to Costco and am now shopping for a new player that handles CD's better since this is how I use it 80% of the time. Oh, I almost forgot. The last straw was I rented a movie with some minor scratches and it wouldn't play it! I take the movie back to the store, they put it into their machine, and it played fine!
Rating:
Summary: Dont Waste Your Money!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Review: I bought this product seven months ago and have had nothing but problems. When I got it home the carousel would not stay open. So I took it back. Within a week of the labor warranty running out the Laser Processing Unit went bad. Fool that I am I paid to get it fixed. Two weeks after the gaurantee on that unit ran out it quit working again. I tried e-mailing panasonic but of course mysteriously that aspect of the web site was not working each time I tried to submit my complaint. Shocker!!!!! Save your time and money and stay away from this money pit.
Rating: 
Summary: Features+Price = Great Value!
Review: I have it. I Love it. Did anyone mention that this machine has it's own video controls? brightness, contrast etc. I amped the contrast and sharpness on it and the picture on my Mitsubishi 60 inch is AWESOME! I've heard of pregressive scan and i'm sure it's great and all, but this machine is JUST FINE without it...
I'm going to buy another one for my stereo in my other room.. AWESOME!!!
Rating:
Summary: Poor CD-R disck compatibility
Review: I make lot of home video in VCD format on CD-R & CD-RW discs, this unit has terrible compatiblity when reading these discs, it play the slow rated 8X or slower CD-R/RW OK, but virtually all the blank CD-R/RW disc are high speed rated like 32X to 40X, the player just won't read those disk at all half the time, those it reads but skipps a lot. So if you want just play commercial type DVD movie, it's a great player, but for home made CD-R/RW recordings, forget it. Get an APEX DVD player, it reads them all.
Rating:
Summary: Broke after less than a year, lost two of my DVDs
Review: I was quite happy with this DVD player for the first five months. However, into the sixth month, it started to have trouble switching discs. Sometimes I would open the tray to find two discs on top of one another. Then tonight, it decided to lose two discs. Now it won't close, it won't turn off unless I unplug it, and I can hear the two discs rattling around. Customer support has been absolutely useless and the nearest repair station (the warranty no longer covers labor, by the way) is very far away. I don't own a car right now. All in all, I'm not too pleased with the player.
Rating: 
Summary: Decent player with flaws
Review: I've had the CV52 for about 9 months and I am generally pleased with its performance. Before I go into details, I should let you know what I was looking for from the unit. I got it to add a DVD player to my home theater and to replace a 5 disc carousel cd player. I specifically picked this model because of its mp3 capabilities, considering I already have a few dozen mp3 cds burned for my tdk mojo portable player. I've also tried out VCDs on the unit.As a DVD player, the unit meets all my admittedly lax standards. I have no need for progressive scan, and the picture is certainly crisp enough for my 29" TV. It's got all the features I would want or need, including variable speed fast forward and reverse, zooms, subtitles, and dozens of other things I've never used. The only annoying thing is that you have to use the remote to select the disc (no direct disc access, in marketing speak). As an mp3 player, the unit is more lacking. It doesn't support id3 tags, which is a very basic function that any mp3 player should include. But far worse than that, the chip is so basic that it will only play mp3s that are encoded with specific codecs. If you are ripping your CDs yourself this is no problem, but it is a pain if you are grabbing mp3s from the internet or if you've already encoded your CDs in a different codec. Specifically, it will correctly play mp3s created with the Fraunhofer codec and the Radium codec. It won't play files created with LAME, the free encoder. Luckily for me, my mojo has the same problem, so I had already been using Radium when I bought this unit. The mp3 interface is pretty robust, although not as good as my mojo. You can select songs on the TV, which is a cool feature. As long as your mp3s are organized in logical directories, you'll have no trouble selecting songs. The sound quality, if the files are encoded properly, is decent at 128k and good at 160k or 192k. I'd put it at better than radio quality and slightly inferior to CD (or even rivaling CD depending on what type of music it is). The unit also plays VCDs well. If you feed Nero (burning software) some MPGs and tell it to create a VCD, it will play nicely in this DVD player, although the picture isn't great (a limitation of the VCD format). The unit technically does not support SVCDs, but if you use the "SVCD header trick" (search the internet to find out more), it will play correctly with a much clearer picture than a VCD. I've had it work every time I've tried it, but YMMV of course. Alternatively, I've heard that you can convert an SVCD to an XVCD, but I haven't tried it. I haven't had any trouble with the unit reading media, and I've given it CDRs, CDRWs, and DVDRs. I haven't tried burning mp3s onto a DVDR, though, which sounds interesting. There are several complaints in these reviews about the user interface, but I think the problems are overstated. Some things are not particularly intuitive (you have to press stop twice to get a disc out), but they are not complex. To play random mp3's from a single disc, you turn off sequential mode; to play from all discs you turn it on. That's pretty simple. Note though, when you're playing from all five discs, there is a delay between songs that lasts a few seconds. All in all, the unit has its drawbacks, but it's very cheap and has a lot of features that you would not expect in that price range.
Rating:
Summary: The Good, The Bad & The Ugly
Review: The Good - Great price for a well-rounded set of functions. This is my first DVD player, hooked up to an older television, so I can't speak to the audio and picture quality. Seems just fine to me. The Bad - Not user-friendly. I had hoped for more intuitive interactive controls. The instruction book is hard to follow with the vague on-screen icons. The Ugly - Not for older eyes. The remote has miniscule buttons that are hard to read...with or without reading glasses, especially without a light. Worse, the on-screen icons all look alike, if you can see them at all! I'm the electronics and computer guru in my family and I chose the Panasonic CV52 player based on reviews from Amazon, Consumer Reports and a few other audio/video sites. I blew off the warnings that this unit was not user-friendly thinking, "C'mon, how difficult can it be". Well, lesson learned for me. The reviews were all correct and I wholeheartedly agree that the problems with the remote and on-screen icons makes it a challenge to enjoy actually watching a DVD movie. Then again, I love a challenge and have resolved to overcome these mechanical difficulties. The greater challenge will be to then teach my husband (the NON-technophile in the family) how to start using it!
Rating:
Summary: Great versatile DVD/CD/MP3 player
Review: There are lots of 5-disc DVD/CD changers available now, and a few of them even play MP3 discs, but what sold me on this one was the fact that it will play my MP3s in random order. I've looked at about a dozen 5-disc changers with MP3 capabilities over the last few months, but the one feature they were all missing was the ability to play MP3 songs randomly. When you can cram 100+ songs onto an MP3 CD, you don't usually want to hear them in the same order every time. This DVD changer can play the tracks from 1 disc randomly, or you can load up 5 MP3 discs and have the random pick from all of them (500+ random songs). An added bonus for some people is the ability to play WMA-encoded songs, but watch out - WMA's that have been flagged as copyrighted won't play. If you turn on the TV when MP3 files are playing, you can see the folder and the first 30 characters of the song that's playing; an on-screen menu also lets you easily select folders or songs to play. Other than its MP3 capabilities, it's a pretty standard DVD/CD changer. It is not a progressive-scan player, though, which is odd since it's so new. The manual says it can play DVD, CD, Video CD, CD-R, and CD-RW, as well as DVD-R discs that were "recorded on a Panasonic DVD video recorder". Things it says it won't play include DVD-Audio, SVCD, Divx, and Photo CDs. Panasonic opted for minimal controls on the face of the unit, which probably allowed it to be fairly thin (it's the shortest multi-disc unit I've seen) but means that you have to run most things from the remote, including choosing which disc to play. On-screen menus help you set up the player and show you which special options you've selected. Oddly, pressing the Stop button on the remote or the unit stops the current feature (song or movie) but the disc remains active - you must press Stop a 2nd time to tell the player that you're done with the disc and want to switch to something else (like change to another disc). When the unit powers off, the power stays off, so there's no point in plugging it in to your amplifier hoping that you only have to use a single Power button. No changer is perfect, but the only things I've run into with this one are minor annoyances rather than actual problems. And it's great to finally find a changer with true random functionality for both my CDs and MP3 discs. If you want a single unit to function as both a DVD player and a CD changer, this one does it all for you, in a very slim package. By the way, despite what the Amazon information about this changer says, it does not have a "shuttle dial" or a "unified remote control". Pros:
- DVD changer with CD, MP3, WMA capabilities
- MP3/WMA songs can be played in random order from one or all discs
- Change 4 discs while playing the 5th
- On-screen setups and MP3 file/folder selection Cons:
- No progressive scan
- Must use remote for most functions
Rating:
Summary: Very poor Service
Review: This DVD lasted just over a year. Panasonic DVDs have a problem with the Optical Pickup Unit. This DVD also had the same problem. One fine day (just after the 1 year warranty period expired), it started showing 'No Playing' message for any disc I used. Although I live very close to a Panasonic Service center, I could never reach them before or after work since they are open only from 9am to 5 pm Mon-Fri.
There is a class action suit pending against Panasonic for selling faulty DVDs. I came to know of this only after mine broke.
I would not recommend this player to anyone.
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