With DVD now replacing VHS as the mainstream form of video playback at home, it's not surprising the market has been flooded with players for all styles, tastes and functions. Zensonic, a little known name, has joined the queue for your DVD dollars, but there's a difference. This unit plays more than just your rental movies and existing DVD discs, it's also capable of VBR MP3, WMA, JPEG, PhotoCD, HDCD Xvid, AVI, MPEG layers 1, 2, and 4 play, the latter of which is more commonly referred to as DivX, named after the compression codec. This means you're now able to burn your own media at home, be it your home movies, stills or music and play them back on your Z300 player. Not only will the player take just about any major format you can throw at it, it will take all current recordable and readily available media including CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R/RW and DVD+RW.

Another great function of this unit is the upgradeability of the firmware within the player -- as Zensonic releases newer software, simply download it from the website, burn it to CD and use the ‘auto update' function, it does the rest.

Capable of 96Khz/24 bit audio D/A conversion, the Z300 does native Dolby Digital 5.1 and DTS surround sound decoding and is easily integrated into existing home theatre set ups with the optical Toslink output or via the 6 RCA plugs for unpowered speakers without needing an amplifier.

On the video front, it boasts S-video, composite, component and 75 ohm coaxial outputs as well as VGA D-Sub, allowing you to play DVDs on your monitor, projector or television. It's multi-region, which means you can play discs from outside Australia without changing codes, and is even compatible with RCE (Region Code Enhancement) discs.
Our model was pre-production and the disc tray was a little flimsy; but hopefully this will be corrected in the final shipping model.

An out of the box multi-region DVD, DivX and Xvid player with all the features of more expensive major brand players at an extremely affordable price, this slim silver player will easily integrate with your existing equipment. It would also make an ideal starting point for anyone looking to build a home theatre setup from scratch.