J Tantalus recently posted a comment about his experiences with the Cinea DVD player to a previous entry. I thought he had some interesting things to say, and since most people won’t find his comment, hidden as it is in a year-old entry, I thought I’d highlight it hear:

Every BAFTA member I know has had to have either a replacement Cinea DVD machine or a software update or, usually both!
One BAFTA member sent an email to Cinea saying he had a problem with his machine and he accidentally hit “send to all”. I replied to him to tell him that his email might not have gone to Cinea and that he was not alone in his misery. He said he had an inbox full of emails from other BAFTA members also saying that their machines were so much junk.
One common problem has been that the image, although filling the screen was off-centre. This was either on the PAL setting alone or in both PAL and NTSC. This has necessitated a software update delivered on CD. We were first promised this in “a few weeks” a year ago. They have just arrived.
Other miscellaneous faults include dead displays and random crackles when playing CDs. I’m not sure where the “high end” idea comes from. If it wasn’t for the watermarks (don’t you just love being treated like a crook?) we’d have been better off buying a £30 player from Tesco.
After all this it looks like Disney might be the only reason that we have to give this thing house room. Nobody else can be bothered to watermark their screeners.
Po-faced as ever, Cinea have also made the players single region – even though people in the film industry have perfectly legitimate business reasons for viewing DVDs from other regions. Indeed, Warner Brothers have already sent 2 Region 1 discs this year to BAFTA members which can’t be played on the Cinea machines!
On the whole, I regret the passing of the VHS screeners. You could watch them on anything and once watched, they provided a useful source of blank tapes.

If you move your eyes a degree or two to the right, you’ll notice a new feature: a complete tally of all the DVDs I’ve received, the Q&As I’ve witnessed, and the screenings I’ve attended since the For Your Consideration season started in October. I’ve also listed the films I hope to see before 4 January, when the first round of BAFTA voting ends. I’ll try to update the tally regularly as I attended more screenings.
If there’s a film that came out in 2005 that you think deserves consideration in any category, and I’ve left it off my list, let me know, and I’ll try to see it.
One thing that helped me put this list together is that I’m pretty careful about keeping track of which movies I’ve seen; after I’ve seen a movie, I make a point of entering it into my list, and jotting down a few notes about my impression. Looking over the list as a whole, I notice that I’ve seen roughly 85 movies thus far in 2005 (including DVDs). This is far above the national average, but doesn’t seem like all that much to me. I blame all the traveling I’ve done this year. Clearly, I am spending too much time seeing the real world, and not enough time in somebody else’s fantasy. I will have to do something about that next year.