Dear MS member,
A few details for the above model are here to clarify your doubts. See as on date this is the only player in INDIA which can read DivX format apart from few ones from Samsung priced higher than this. The cost of Philips 642k is 5990/- with 1000/ worth 8 hindi movies and 2 cartoon movies free at chennai and even on net too for online purchase.
This player has a good signal to noise ratio of around 100db with nice THD value. It is sleek model with only 43 mm height. The main factor is it has in built decoder for both dolby digital and dts, which is very rare to see in INDIA at this price for company like philips. LG DKI8654 is also at 5800/- with inbuilt decoder for only dolby, but doesn’t have the facility to read DivX cds and MPEG4 format. A scan on net will let u know the importance of both these formats in future.
I can only say in short, DVDs can be copied to normal cheap CDrs in DivX format without much loss of their quality, giving us an option to buildup our own collection of nice films. At a price of this, certainly this model rules over LG and Samsung at this particular phase. Nothing wrong in having a player which is designed to take care of few of the future formats to come.