Apex MP-2000

Apex's MP-2000 starts off on the wrong foot, with a superfluous feature-list sticker covering the front corner of the screen, which left a little bit of glue on the screen. Not a huge deal, but frustrating and pointless. It's pretty easy to warm up to its no-brainer interface and simple, if not quite classy, chassis, and forgive the bad first impression. Like most of the other players, the MP-2000 mounts as a mass storage device in Windows, making loading it with media as simple as cutting and pasting data into its Audio or Video folders (the recorded shows live inside the Video folder, as well).

It's probably not fair to call the Apex MP-2000 DVR-like. Its video recording functions are limited to just a simple recording/not recording function that captures video from composite sources onto its hard drive. In some ways the simplicity is nice-there aren't confusing menus to go through-but it has a tendency to occasionally screw up, forcing you to rewind (if possible) whatever it is you're recording and start over.

Unfortunately, for everything the MP-2000 does right, it has a pretty wretched screen, despite the same QVGA resolution that most of the other players share. Even so, the Apex is by far the least expensive portable video player here, so if you're on a budget it should do the trick.