Review: Mustek PL8C70 and PL8D70 Portable In-Car DVD Player

Car drives can be long and notoriously boring and once you've heard the first ' are we nearly there yet?' you know it'd downhill from then on. The most obvious way to get round the monotony is to keep the backseat passengers - and by that I mean kids - distracted and entertained. So that's where portable DVD players come into their own. I recently checked out Mustek's portable DVD player which can be twinned with a second screen. The kit contained two 7 inch TFT LCD screens, one of which incorporated the DVD player that could also play CD, CD-R/CDRW and Kodak Picture CDs plus there's an SD/MMC card reader to view other pictures from, say, your digital camera.

The screens had built in speakers, but there was the option to use headphones (twin jacks per screen) if you don't want to share the audio with other passengers, the in-ear headphones on offer won't be suitable for smaller children but for older ones and adults they'll be fine.

To mount the screens in the car, there were black webbed harnesses which were probably the most puzzling bit. It took a fair amount of fiddling to get the harnesses sorted out and they could really have benefitted from some printed arrows or instruction - 'up', 'down' or 'back' would have sufficed just to make it that little bit easier. I also wasn't too confident the screens would stay put but they did. My other gripe was that the screens had to be connected via wires which means they are strung across the middle of your car. It could have really benefitted from wireless technology.

They are light and slim though. When you need to fold them away, they each have a carry case and both could fit in a standard glovebox or unobtrusively in the boot. As for charging it up, the included power adapter is fairly chunky but it does enable you to power up in the car. You could also use the rechargeable battery.

Other options for this product include using it to show pictures during a presention or hooking it up to the home TV to view your films on a bigger screen which is good if you're going to a holiday home or relative/ friend without a DVD player.

Pricewise the PL8C70 DVD screen is £152 and the single screen PL8D70 is £81.99

Product page: Mustek