Testing the DVD-L100 under battery power

Now comes the hardest part of this review - testing! To accomplish this feat we had to buy round trip tickets from the east to west coast and back on a Boeing 747.... Well, no we didin't quite go for a test that realistic, but we did nuke some popcorn and sit down to watch two DVD's on the DVD-L100 under just battery power.

Two different DVD's were choosing to ensure no disk defects would come into play - possibly affecting the outcome of our tests. The first DVD was Black Hawk Down, and the second, The Matrix. The matrix is our default DVD test disk, but with all the "testing" we've had to do I've seen this movie on the order of 50 times.

After an overnight charge of the Lithium Ion battery we set forth with Black Hawk Down, a 144 minute movie which has won awards for its sound and superb editing. Visually, the movie is pretty rich in tone and cinematography so it acted as a good reference point for more subtle visualizations and colour saturation than The Matrix would be able to.

With Black Hawk Down (BHD) there were a few moments when DVD playback would stutter, or stop momentarily on irregular intervals. With the first playback the movie froze about half-way through, and the unit had to be restarted after a short cool-down period. I think this may have just been an initial burn-in, or possibly disk related because on subsequent playback sessions the same problems did not pop up. We did see some intermittent stuttering for the first two playback sessions with the BHD DVD, but by the third the playback from start to finish was perfect - no stutters, to pauses, and no skips. After that everything played great.

Testing with the Matrix DVD showed none of these issues at all, so it I don't suspect the DVD-L100 was a fault, but performance may vary from DVD to DVD.