Scan Computers of Bolton have recently carved a niche reputation for themselves as suppliers of reasonably priced, good quality kit. Their latest offering to the crowded sub-£200 price bracket market for DVD hardware is their own branded Scan SC-2000 machine.

Currently priced at £150 including VAT, the machine is directly aimed at taking sales away from the popular Wharfedale machine among others, and carries similar features with a few more goodies thrown in.

The machine can be made fully multi-region easily with a one step procedure that will allow the unit to play DVDs from all regions without any initial 'change the region' sequence as seen on some other 'multi-region' machines. It is a set it and forget it procedure. It can play MP3 files from your CD-Rs, and provides audio streams for PCM, Dolby Digital and DTS sound.

The unit originates from Korea, and is an overall polished package - many times on these imported machines, small things such as the manual for instance are often a half hearted attempt, but not so here. The manual is excellent throughout, with plenty of helpful screenshots (mainly of Saving Private Ryan), and is not a poor translation nor does it suffer from pigeon English.

The remote control is one of the best we have seen on any DVD player (something other competitor machines have been criticised for), and unusually for this price point the machine features two Scart sockets, as well as the usual connectivity options.

It has a simple, uncluttered layout with the major function buttons replicated on the front panel. On the left hand side is the Power button, and on the right is the Open/Close, Menu, Display, Step and Stop buttons. At the extreme right is the familiar circular bank of controls so prevalent on current video products, allowing basic transport and menu functions.

Round the back of the machine are the two Scart sockets. This is a welcome feature on a DVD player with the multitude of A/V equipment we gadget freaks have these days, and will allow you to connect your VCR to the DVD player, and then both units to your TV very easily.

There is one pair of analogue phono audio outs, one composite video out, one coaxial digital out, a TOS-Link optical digital audio out, and an SVideo out.

It is also a rather small machine. Its external dimensions are only 420 x 84 x 270 mm, and looks really compact when placed next to other DVD players.

The menus are designed to make them visually appealing and easy to use, via a very pretty GUI. A screen saver is featured, as is four separate modes of '3D Sound' that are available from just two speakers. You also get a 'Marker' function, where the machine will store five positions in memory, for later retrieval, a child lock, and eight different languages for the on screen graphics.

The Scan is a very solid machine. Firstly the tray ejects gracefully when required, with no two second pause that some machines suffer. The tray is pretty stable and glides quietly out with no drop down flap used. All the controls have a nice action, and do not suffer from the dreaded plasticy loose flimsy feel as may be seen on other units.

There is little or no give on the rear connection panel, so you can plug all your leads directly into the machine with no horrible creaks or groans as the rear panel never flexes.

The remote is ergonomically designed and fits well in the palm of the hand. The buttons are also pleasingly laid out, with the main transport controls arranged centrally around the direction controls. Although some of the buttons are small, the main ones are so logically positioned it will be easy to find Pause when the lights are out and you have just the glow from your TV screen or projector to see by.

MP3 playback supports pretty much any standard PC based file structure you have on your CD-R, as long as files end in the right suffix. When inserting a disc it scans all directories and produces a minature on-screen file explorer in which you can browse folders, unfortunately only listing the first few characters of each filename which can make things hard to identify.

The only controls once playing a title are stop, pause, next track and previous track, making it not quite as flexible as it could be. This combined with short visible names makes the Scan not the most perfect mp3 player in the world, but it is still better than most.

To modify the Scan to multi region, in the 'no disc' mode, on the remote:

• Press SETUP
  
• TITLE
  
• STEP
  
• NEXT which lets you into the 'secret' menu
  
• Scroll down to Region ID
  
• Set to BYPASS
  
• Save and exit the menu, to ensure the Scan auto detects the region.

The machine originally had a 'Macrovision' option accessible from this secret menu. The Korean manufacturer of this product was not happy about giving users this option to disable due to the increasing problems of disabling Macrovision in the USA. Thus this has unfortunately been removed.

There is still the CSS option available in the menu. However don't touch this, as disabling CSS renders the unit inoperative for all but unencrypted Region 0 titles.

Under test, the machine happily played all Region 1s, Region 2s, and the Region 0s we threw at it with no region ID problems. Even the notorious Disney range, known to trip up certain region-bypassed machines in the past, worked fine.

Reviewer's aging Pioneer 505 is virtually pensioned off now, but comparing this Scan machine to the Pioneer brings home the advances in DVD technology in the three years since the older machine was designed - it is pig slow, mind you so is the Wharfedale in comparison to the Scan.

The machine coped perfectly well with the technically demanding DVD games such as Dragon's Lair. These games are known to be incompatible with some machines, but we had no problem with the playability or the control of the on screen characters. The only point to note is that the machine tends to have a slight delay for the audio to cut in from say, a PAUSE to PLAY operation, or as noted on these games, a command for the on screen character to do something. This is not really an issue when using the machine as a DVD player, but this 'pause' in audio is noticed on Dragon's Lair.

We also tested certain titles that make use of seemless branching, such the The Abyss. This title uses this technique to decide which chapters to play depending on whether the 'theatrical' version or the 'special edition' version is selected initially. No problems were seen.

We tested many of the notorious 'problem' discs. The unit passed The Matrix test with no problems at all, and picture quality was very high given the price point. RGB is the connection of choice, and will bring out the best in both the DVD player and the display equipment. SVideo connected again produces a beautifully sharp picture with vibrant colours and no banding. Pictures benefit from high definition throughout.

On test a minor point we noted, was that when connected via Scart to a Sony TV for some reason the composite feed via the Scart would switch the TV into 16:9 mode, thus producing a compressed ratio image. When using the RGB feed on the Scart, this problem did not occur. Now this is a minor issue, as no one will be using a composite connection if their display equipment is capable of RGB or SVideo (which is virtually any TV made in the last few years). Having adjusted all the settings on the player and the TV, we could not cure the problem. If your TV auto senses an RGB feed and gives this priority over the composite feed, then this will not be an issue, but the Sony tended to select the composite feed first, requiring a second press of the button to access the RGB. Most players would allow the TV to favour the RGB signal first.

Occasionally, having had the machine on Pause for time, switching back to Play tended to result in a slightly jerky picture. It seemed as if the machine took a little time to recover from the switching back to the Play mode, but this did not last for long, and did not happen every time Pause was used. We found that a quicker way to 'reset' the machine after a Pause, was to press Pause and the Play quickly in succession on the remote. Again a relatively minor point, that did not seem confined to a certain type or range of DVDs.

We also noticed a little lip sync delay when playing the Region 2 release of Human Traffic, a DVD with the worst reputation for this problem, and which has tripped up many other players in the past.

On the bright side the unit will output both NTSC and true PAL, selectable via the setup menu. Although PAL to NTSC conversion isn't perfect, there is a slight juddier if you're of the fussy persuasion, it does work quite well.

The 3D Sound features are probably of limited use. It is a nice little novelty, but I can't imagine too many users seriously making good use of this feature. It is nice to play with initially, but I guess when the novelty wears off little use will be made of it.

There were no problems on playing CD-Rs, and in general, audio CDs sounded acceptable and were relatively pleasing to the ear.

As noted above on the Dragons Lair test, audio can take a fraction longer than most machines to kick in after the remote command has been send to the machine.

In terms of sheer value for money, we cannot seriously fault it. Sure there are one or two minor issues, but hopefully these will be ironed out over time, and these issues have often tripped up many a prestigious brand in the past. Sony and Pioneer have each suffered the stigma of manufacturing lip-sync problematic machines, and I would be a lot more disgruntled if I had just shelled out 600 notes for one of these units instead, on the assumption that 'Expensive=No problems'. Of course this is not always the case.

The sheer speed of the machine must not be underestimated. DVD players have been notoriously slow in the past when navigating the menus, but most newer machines these days are faster than ever before. This is one plus point that everyone will feel the benefit of, and is most noticeable when having been used to an older, slower machine.It looks like the popular Wharfedale could now have a serious competitor.

	Build	Picture	Sound	Features	Speed	Value	Overall
	8	8	8	8	9	9	8