Akai 823

I would like to clarify at the outset that I have not bought this particular model of AKAI VCD player. I had purchased the AKAI Home Theatre system about 4 years back.

The purchase price was about Rs. 18, 000. This was the time when AKAI was ruling the roost, and claiming to be the seller of good quality products at down-to-earth prices.

I took the plunge.

For the first few months, the VCD player was working really fine. Video quality was decent. There were the usual features, and all were working well. Yeah...it looked like AKAI was a good buy. Who cares bout the brand if the product is good!

Then came the sad part. It all started with the Tray jamming up. The player was sent off for servicing. Back it came, with the CD scratched n broken. The response time of the buttons became slow. You had to press the open/close button a couple of times before the CD Tray actually opened.

Over the next few months, nothing else happened. Then, again, the CD Tray jammed up. Off went the player, and came back, in a condition similar to the one after the last service.

After a year or so, the Tray started gettin jammed very regularly. Sometimes, just swiching the player on n off worked. Sometimes, one had to bang it a bit. The Service personnel told us that there was no way of rectifying the error.

Soon, it reached a time when one had to ply it open after every CD. Even the rotator inside got spoilt.

Well, what all this means is that you can never be sure about the quality of an AKAI product. If you have the luck, it may run well for quite sometime, else may go kaput in a few months itself. The probability for the latter is quite high!