Mustek PL510 portable DVD player

There’s nothing like a portable DVD player on a long train journey to make you the most popular guy in the carriage. I wonder if it would be possible to make a second income by renting out seats around you to bleary-eyed commuters seeking to ease their passage to work with a Hollywood blockbuster. I’m not condoning this sort of behaviour as it probably breaks a large number of both piracy and locomotive laws but if one were to try it, Mustek‘s PL510 would be a wise choice. The PL510 sits firmly at the larger end of portable DVD players with a tasty 10″ TFT screen which runs in 16:9 aspect ratio with progressive scan output. Mustek has kindly thought to put two headphone jacks into it and when folded away is only 3 cm thick which makes it a lot easier to lug around than a laptop. It is compatible with a great number of media formats: DVD, DVD+R, DVD-R, DVD+RW, DVD-RW, CD, CD-R, CD-RW and even JPEG in case you want to bore the people around you with your latest holiday pics.

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Anti-shock protection ensures it doesn’t skip if it’s shaking around and it has built in stereo speaker plus an output for Dolby Digital 5.1 in case you happen to also be carrying 5 speakers and sub-woofer in your backpack. My favourite feature is the extra input jack allowing you to hook up a console to it; I think maybe the Xbox is a little hefty, but a PSTwo might complement it nicely… The one downside is that the battery life is a little short, just two and a half hours, fine if you’re using it with the car adapter or in a nice modern train, but could be a pain if you’re using it on a flight. The retail price is a reasonably competitive £279.99, with that you get a car mount, the carry case, a mini remote control and a crowd of admiring fans.

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