These days, if you drive kids on long trips, a DVD player can verge on essential equipment. In my opinion, portable DVD players are better than built-ins because (1) I can take them out when I park, (2) I can often use them to watch DVDs at my destination, (3) they're inexpensive enough that even if i need to replace one, I can buy several for the cost of a built-in, and most importantly, (4) I can take it out for SHORTER trips, so that my kids don't beg me to watch Bolt during trips to the store.

Summary: The Philips PB 9011/37 is a nice player, compatible with Blue-Ray, standard DVDs, and with USB input. It has a second screen that you can mount, so that both headrests can show the same movie. It will play to a TV through HDMI out, and the remote control is nice. My only major gripe is that it doesn't have a battery, so it won't play when unplugged.

What's Good:

- In my opinion, the primary benefit of this is that it's Blue-Ray compatible... Read more

These portable blue ray players are a great size for traveling. We've been using the Phillips 7" dual DVD players up until this one and I liked those. But the larger size and improved movie resolution are nice on these! Of course, my children aren't too picky about either of those.
I love that the children can now watch all of the blu-ray movies we've bought on road trips, whereas before we had to stick to only DVD's. (You may be wondering what kind of a parent I am, but in my defense, my children are only 4 and 6 so their DVD collection is pretty recent and blu-rays are a little more durable than regular DVD's so why not?) And like I said, they look very nice now. On our older one, it was painful for us parents to watch anything on them when we traveled. These look fabulous and even have HDMI outputs so we can hook it up to a larger tv when we travel and there is no DVD player, or blu ray player, available.

Also there's an elaborate (for a portable DVD player)... Read more

I know this is a weird thing to lead off with, but I was really surprised that this dual-screen Blu-ray player comes with a travel case. I've owned more portable DVD players than I can count and every time I get a new one it seems like it's a big hassle to find a case that works. The case they included with this player is amazing. Everything fits perfectly. I can't believe what a difference it makes when the case is specifically designed for the player. It's big though. These 9" screens are big, so the case needs to be big too.

But enough about the case...

The product description for this item is surprising to me. I'm surprised they call it a "Portable DVD Player", because that's too modest. Sure, this plays DVDs, but it's a Blu-ray player. The ability to play Blu-ray discs on the road is a huge step up.

I've owned this product's predecessor, the... Read more