Wednesday, November 23, 2005

Advice for portable DVD players?

I want to get a portable DVD player with a long battery life to help ease my loneliness on long plane rides. (This will be my version of joining the proverbial Frequent Flyer Club.) My computer's battery life doesn't make it the most amenable thing in the world when it comes to watching movies on an airplane, and the portable DVD players I saw on CompUSA's website don't have great battery lives either. The best I saw with rechargeable batteries was 3.5 hours. Does anybody know of portable DVD players with better life? Some of the players used AA batteries. Does anybody know how long those typically last in such machines?

Ideally, I want to get this in time for my 12/10 flight to England, so if anybody has any knowledge to pass along, let me know. Or, if this should lead to, say, a Fry's trip, I'd be up for that as well.

I want to get a DVD camcorder as well, but the portable DVD player is a bit more, uh... "urgent" (so to speak).

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

How about additional battery for laptop? I may be alone in this, but am skeptical of the portable DVD players... It's a lot of weight for just one function. What do you think about vedio ipod? The details aside, I definitely thin that you should get something that you KNOW will improve the quality of your life. -jing

Mason said...

Laptop batteries aren't so great either, and I want something long enough to not have to make a change during the movie.

The video iPod is a tempting option, although I already have an iPod (two of them actually, but one of them is several years older than the other and is essentially a back-up at this point) and a larger screen is greatly preferable.

I've seen a couple things advertised in recent days, but the advertisements haven't indicated anything about battery life, so I'm going to need to go into some stories and find out what's available. If I start seeing 5+ hours on the battery life (for something priced reasonably), it will be much more promising. It's true that I'd only use this on flights, but it was those Sydney and Taiwan marathons that made me realize I wanted one of these if I could find one for a reasonable price. I can certainly afford one and my career will offer more such trips in the future.

The DVD camcorders are much more viable than they used to be. I only started seeing them a couple years ago (and there were only one or two models available between all the brands), and the prices are much better now. I'd like to take more pictures when I travel (and want the video functionality if I'm going to buy something anyway), and my hope is that getting one of these will encourage me to do so.