Product: Sanyo DWM-400 DVD Player
Company: Sanyo
Price: Under $50
Reviewer: The Sitter Downers (Adam Jackson)
Date: Friday, April 22, 2005

Aaron and I both own Sanyo DWM-400 DVD Players. The player can be purchased at Wal-Mart for under $50.

The appearance of this player is not one of its strong points. Some of the indicator lights are orange while others are green creating a curious color combination that leaves the DWM-400 without much of a coolness factor.

Like most players on the market today, the DWM-400 will play DVD, VCD, MP3, Kodak Picture CDs and JPEG CDs. In addition it is a progressive scan player, although you must have a TV capable of displaying a progressive scan signal to utilize this feature. It also has all the jacks needed for simple home theater application including RCA and Coaxial audio out jacks, and composite, s-video and component video hookups.

The Sanyo DWM-400 offers three picture ratios including, 4:3 letterbox, 4:3 pan and scan, and 16:9. It also supports DTS, which is a personal favorite of mine.

The remote and on screen menus are about what you would expect from a low-end DVD player, but like any system you get used to it and get the job done. The remote is sans illumination so forget about operating the remote in the dark until you memorize the button layout.

The performance of the unit is again, on par for a $50 DVD player. I have had to cycle the power on the player before when the sound mysteriously stopped playing. In addition, I have experienced video artifacts during playback, such as horizontal scan lines and pixeled out scenes, but these problems could have been due to the discs that were in the player rather than the player itself. As a home theater fan, with more invested in my home theater than I care to admit, I would prefer to have a player with superior video quality if possible. Still, I chose this player over an upconverting Samsung player that sells for over four times the price of the Sanyo DWM-400. Obviously there would have been no contest when it comes to performance, but that leads me to the sole reason both of The Sitter Downers own this player. Namely, the Sanyo DWM-400 has TV Guardian technology built in.

TV Guardian can be purchased as a separate unit, which is then connected between any DVD player and your television to accomplish the same results, however the costs of the TV Guardian unit is higher than the cost of the Sanyo which combines both products into one. The TV Guardian technology follows the closed captioning on the film (closed captioning is not required to be visible for the TV Guardian to work) and mutes the sound when undesirable content (profanity) is being spoken in the film. The level of filtering can be adjusted and is a matter of personal preference. This might bother some viewers as you do miss short pieces of the dialogue in movies that contain profanity (which is almost all movies today). The technique used by TV Guardian and implemented in the Sanyo DWM-400 is pretty reliable (I can think of only two times when it has failed to catch an expletive).

Pros: Cost, TV Guardian Built In, Progressive Scan
Cons: Video Performance, Poor Remote Design, Appearance, Durability Issues (related in reviews I have read)

2 Out Of 3 Stooges