I had bought this Philips 3256 DVD player in September 2008 from Kamla Trading near Ghatkopar Station(west). I bought it for Rs 2990. It is available in DMart for Rs 2950 now.
Built: Good metal body, nice front panel, front USB port.
Remote: A very different remote as compared to other DVD players. Do not use rechargeable
AAA batteries for the remote as they have 1.2 V power whereas the remote’s requirement is 1.5 V. It will work with 1.2 V batteries but only intermittently. It is a very good remote and you can comfortably handle the DVD player.
Video formats supported: It plays all major video formats like .vob(DVD movies), .avi( only if it is encoded with DivX or Xvid codec i.e mpeg4 videos), .mpg and .dat. It does not support .MP4 format. MP4 is a container for mpeg4 which is not supported. This player is officially DivX certified and excellently plays compatible mpeg4 videos.
Media playablity: Supports CD, VCD, SVCD, DVD( R, RW) and USB drives. If you want to play your SD card or micro SD card just connect your Card Reader to the USB port and voila you can play all the compatible formats. Hard disk drives which are FAT32 formatted can also be played athough the DVD player will take a long time to open all the folders in the hard drive.
Picture Quality: I had a Passion DVD player. And I can tell you there is a vast difference in picture reproduction. 3256 gives sharp, lifelike reproduction as compared to Passion which had lots of bleeding, soft pictures and lots of freeze frames. I compared Moser Baer player with the Philips one while buying. Philips picture quality was much better(Same DVD disc, same TV and same set of connecting cables were used for comparision). JPEG images are loaded quite fast as compared to the delay seen in most players. I have a Canon S2 IS and photos taken by it are accurately reproduced on the TV screen.
Sound: I have connected two Philips multimedia speakers to the Player with an adapter cable( costs Rs 50 only) and the sound is phenomenal. For just Rs 3650( Rs 2990 for the Player and Rs 650 for the speakers) I feel I have a good enough "Home theatre".
Additional features: 5.1 channel audio output, component video output.
Features absent: HDMI output, Optical out
Conclusion: A very good buy. Go for it. If you have a LCD or Plasma TV go for players which have HD upscaling facility with HDMI or S video output.