Slashdot Mirror

I've recently gotten into the DVD biz, and found this site that has some fantastic coupons for various sites. Just click on the DVD bargains forum, and surf a little. Currently, with the use of this site, I am averaging about $12-$13 a CD! I managed to get the Matrix for $10! --dan

This is slightly offtopic, but I'm sure very helpful for some of the geeks/geek's families out there.. these are some good coupon codes for different online stores.

office max.com has a $20 off a purchaseo f$20 deal, click Here and use the code YES1CFNH2H

Barnes and Nobel (bn.com) has these $10 off $10 codes: CZVRCH7, CBN2222, COSHARE, and CTREATS.
Amazon.com has these $10 off $25: FIRSTGIFT and AMZNPRESENT2

CDNow has these $10 off $14.99 codes: here and here

Last but not lease (see links below for more) Buy.com has $20 off for first time customers. Click Here to get it.

If you're looking for other coupon sites visit these places:
My Coupons.com Message board

Funtasia's Coupons

Another coupon message board

A few things to consider:

a) You don't specify your price range. I assume (we love projecting ourselves) that you're on a budget (e.g. money *is* an object). In that case, the panasonics are a good buy, but there are many such bargains as well. One good place to look is in the forum at dvdtalk.com, which has a discussion board about home components as well as about DVD-ROM drives.

b) Your OS. Why? Because Win98 and Mac let you watch DVD movies on your desktop but so far Linux and the BSDs do not. (I hope someone can correct me heartily!) So, if DVD-ROM is not a huge *current* priority, you might want to get a standalone player for now (it won't depreciate as quickly as a processor would, fortunately) and pick up a commodity DVD-ROM player when you need one. I've heard of them under a hundred bucks now.

c) Brand preference / legacy: I've only seen the Panasonics that are being recommended to you in stores, but so far I agree with the posters -- they seem to be nicely built, are quite full-featured, and have nice controls. The only players I've seen that I'd call truly ugly are the ones from Zenith and from RCA. I just bought a Pioneer DV414; I'm not a big fan of Pioneer industrial design, but I got the player at a good price (USD290 on ebay), and it's available for USD330 or so right now new. Besides aesthetics, you might consider your brand choice if you have linked components you intend to control as one unit; perhaps some of these systems already cooperate, but I am not familiar enough to say. JVC, Pioneer, Sony, Kenwood all have such linkages in order to encourage brand-unformity.

d) Your audio / video anality. If you have or plan to have a audio video system which will allow you to see a real difference, then things like component outs and DTS decoders are a big deal. I don't, so the fact that my player came with component outputs is just a nice novelty.

e) Your stomach. You might well be able to pick up a DIVX machine for cheap in the coming weeks, and plug raisins into the phone jack. Might even find one used, if that is OK with you. You'll still have to shop for the features you want (half a lifeboat isn't a bargain), but if you find one that works for you under $200, you can view it as a cool entry point to DVD and plan to get a better player sooner than you otherwise would with the money you save. Then you can equip another room, or your significant other's apt, or a starving elementary school, or ... Going this route depends on your answer to the question, "This time next year, how close do I think a $300 player will be to today's $500-600 player?"

f) Whether you want to play Video CDs. My pioneer will play them, but I don't have any. Still, one day I might. I wonder if there is free software that would let me create Video CDs from videotapes ... that would be great. I could send video to my family on Video CD.

g) Whether you care about code-freeness. There are some players available without regional coding restrictions, and as others have written, some that will play back both PAL and NTSC. If you're American, and not into obscure releases which would only be available in other regions, this is probably not a huge concern, but it depends on your interests.