• Reading Tests

In order to test the SONY DVP NS955V, we used a wide variety of different disks and formats. First, we tested the audio capabilities of the device by playing Audio CDs, SACDs and MP3 CDs as well as it's video capabilities with DVD videos and video files encoded with the latest versions of Xvid, DivX, Mpeg1 and Mpeg2, uncompressed AVI’s etc. Also, it was essential to test the player's abilities with some other, more difficult formats such as CD Extra, Photo CDs, compressed audio (WMA and Ogg Vorbis), as well as 99min and 90min CDs.

From all these tests, these are the observations we made:

• With multi session disks, if mp3 audio tracks or JPEG image files are recorded in the first session, the player will also play MP3 tracks or show JPEG images recorded in other sessions.
• If audio tracks and images in Music CD format or Video CD format are recorded in the first session, only the first session will be played back.
• The player cannot play CD ROMs recorded in PHOTO CD format, the data part of CD EXTRAS (the audio part plays normally), WMA or OggVorbis.
• 99min CDRs and Video CDs were played normally but not 90 min CDRs.
• The picture quality was exceptional under all the DVD movie viewing tests.
• Sony's Precision Cinema Progressive technology gives crisper and cleaner images.

With DivX movie files, the picture quality was near perfect with no artifacts or flickering.

The SONY DVP NS955V was able to play all the test files we tried and we must also say that it was very fast in opening any DivX file.

It was also very quick when viewing JPEG image files, opening extremely large files in no time.

When we opened an image file, we had the ability to zoom or rotate the file and even listen to mp3 files while viewing the pictures (if there are any on the CD that is).

With MP3 playback, we had no problems at all and the SONY DVP NS955V played them all, whether they used Constant BitRate (CBR) or Variable BitRate(VBR) and at all bit rates.