Introduction

Portable DVD

Let's face it; watching movies on an airplane is a joke. Unless you are a member of the business elite, chances are you will be watching either a 13-inch screen about 6 feet away from you, or a fading, color-shifted projector. Don't even get me started on sound quality. To add insult to injury, unless you actually dig movies like The Love Letter the airlines almost never play any good movies. The solution? Take your own movies with you. One company that can help you with this situation is Afreey.

Afreey is a Taipei, Taiwan based company that specializes in DVD-ROMs and CD-ROMs. They hold patents on stabilizing platforms for the optical pickup and transport mechanisms for these drives. Afreey's R&D department boasts advanced degrees for 80% of its employees. Very impressive.

PDV-2000

The front

Afreey's newest product, the PDV-2000, is a portable DVD player that can help make even the most turbulent airplane rides or road trips a little more bearable. More than just a DVD player, the PDV-2000 also plays standard CDs and most impressively, CD-R and CD-RW MP3 discs. MP3 files that have been burned onto CD-R can be played back on the Afreey with commendable audio quality. You won't have to listen to the same song twice even on those really long trips (but you could if you wanted).

More power

Portable DVD players have been around for a few years, and we are currently in the 3rd generation of portable DVD players. With each generation, the main improvement has been with battery life. Early designs could barely play back a short Jackie Chan flick without running out of juice, but these new designs can take you through all of The Last Emperor, Director's cut. Afreey's PDV-2000 has a massive 6400mAh 7.2V battery that enables over 3 hours of battery life.

The Afreey also has a digital pass-through for Dolby Digital and DTS signals for those digital headphones of yours. There was a time when a consumer magazine said that all CD players basically sound the same. The reasoning was that digital is digital, and there can be no variances. History has shown that there is great variability in how our gadgets process the digital signal, be it audio or video. How does the PDV-2000 do in this regard? Read on and find out!