RCA RC-5200P (1997)
The first DVD player most people in North America ever actually touched, and it was genuinely good.
Overview
Thomson Consumer Electronics had four machines ready for DVD's North American launch - two under the RCA brand, one GE, one ProScan. The RC-5200P was the basic one. Thomson was aiming at a retail price around $599 when the format finally shipped in the spring of 1997. The launch had originally been slated for the previous September. It got pushed back first by the movie industry's demand for workable copy protection, and then by the computer industry's insistence that the scheme be streamlined.
Despite the sophistication of the format it was introducing, the player itself is almost aggressively plain. The front panel carries an AC power switch and a headphone volume control on the left, basic function controls on the right, and an unobtrusive display centered beneath the disc tray. Around back you get a Toslink optical digital audio output, stereo analog outputs, and composite-video and S-video outputs. There is no component video and no internal Dolby Digital decoding. Like most DVD players of its moment, the RC-5200P needs an outboard decoder for 5.1-channel playback. Its bigger sibling, the RC-5500P, has full 5.1-channel AC-3 decoding on board and six analog outputs. If you're hunting a period-correct first-generation DVD deck, that difference matters.
The video is where this player earned its reputation. Audio (March 1997, p.71) put the RC-5200P through an A/B comparison against a THX-mastered laserdisc of GoldenEye, toggling between the two inputs on the same monitor. The reviewer found the differences dramatic rather than subtle. Video noise simply vanished, and the picture took on a crispness he hadn't expected his monitor could produce. Individual licks of flame and smoke in an exploding building read as distinct shapes instead of an orange blob. RCA's one published video spec is a horizontal resolution of 540 lines, against roughly 400 for laserdisc, and the reviewer concluded the spec may well be right. The magazine's verdict, printed as a pull-quote, was that the player yielded the best picture seen outside a TV control room.
Audio held fewer surprises. The soundtracks decoded flawlessly in both Dolby Digital and Dolby Pro Logic, as expected. A reader wrote in to Audio (July 1997, p.10) reporting that the RC-5200P's CD playback was good enough that he put his existing CD players and outboard D/A converter in the closet. He said the player tracked 2-millimeter dropouts on the Pierre Verany test disc better than most CD players managed, including the narrow-pitch tracks and the tracks with two dropouts per revolution. He also noted a quirk: the headphone jack's output impedance is only 50 ohms against the main output's 1,100 ohms. Since the headphone jack has a volume control, he could run the player straight into a power amplifier.
Setup is eased by the user's manual, which HiFi-Stereo (September 1997, p.44) called the best of the several manuals it had seen for this player. The remote got similar praise from Audio. It has a numeric keypad up top for track selection and programming, transport controls along the bottom duplicating the front panel, and a vertical row of special-function buttons down the right. In the center is a cursor control whose four arrows navigate the on-screen menus, with a large Select button acting like an Enter key. Remotes of the period were routinely bloated and confusing, and this one wasn't.
This is a 1997 DVD player, and the format's commercial reality arrived after the hardware did. When Audio received its review sample, Thomson had machines ready to sell but the studios were still gearing up. There was no commercial software available, so the player shipped with a demonstration disc containing a system explanation, a rundown of Thomson's DVD line, and movie clips. The reviewer couldn't exercise the format's multiple-language and switchable-aspect-ratio functions because the demo disc wasn't encoded for them. The hardware performed spectacularly under what the magazine candidly called hothouse conditions.
The RC-5200P is a launch-window DVD deck from a major American brand, built simply and praised for picture quality against the best laserdisc had to offer. At the intended $599 it wasn't a halo product. The lack of internal 5.1 decoding is the main practical limitation for anyone wanting to use one in a surround system today, and the S-video-only video output caps it at the display standards of its era.
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