The Sony DVP-FX820 was my first foray into portable DVD players. I purchased it based on a high rating here on a Amazon and on CNET. I will deal with the good things and then the bad.

This is a technically good unit with all the features you need for DVD playback and the high build quality you would expect from Sony. The 8" screen is the major star of this model. The panel has the native DVD resolution of 480 pixels high (anything more than this is unnecessary with DVD as the player would then need to have up-sampling to fill the resolution). In daylight the screen is great, for me it fell down when used in a darkened room as the black level is not quite good enough to my eyes. The included accessories include the battery pack, wall power adapter, in car power adapter and an A-V cable. A neat feature is the ability to send video and audio signals in to as well as out of the unit. This would be great for viewing camcorder footage on a bigger screen or perhaps even a little gaming while travelling.

Now the downsides...

The battery pack is pretty much the same dimensions as the player and when clipped on makes the whole thing a bit on the portly side. This seems to be a problem that the whole market of portable DVD players seems to suffer from at the moment. In general the player feels a bit larger than it needs to be. The bezel for example has dead space on the sides that reminds me of those early laptops with tiny screens sat in acres of plastic.

The biggest problem I have with this model is how it handles widescreen movies, specifically older non anamorphic encoded widescreen discs. Anamorphic encoded discs look great and fill the screen no problem. But when you put in non-anamorphic disc it presents it letterboxed at with top and bottom bars *and* bars the sides, thus reducing the size to about what you would see on a 5" display. Ut-oh not good! Full screen 4:3 discs will play back with bars only on the sides (you do have the option of stretching to fill 16:9 but then everyone looks like bobble heads!) To me the problem was impossible to get over as most of my DVD collection is widescreen with many older titles that are not anamorphic encoded.

If you have any older non anamorphic discs I would suggest you look elsewhere as you will be disappointed with this model.