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Best Cheap Headrest DVD Roundup 2011

With the cost of OEM vehicle specific headrests being so expensive, not everyone wants to drop $500 to $1000 for the privilege of having a screen or two in the back seat. Luckily, there are a few good sets out there that are available for a fraction of the price and can be installed in any type of vehicle. Let’s take a quick look at 2 of the best in this mini roundup.

1) Pyle DVD Headrest Set (7 inch TFT Monitors, model no: PL71PHB)
Our Rating: 4.5 out of 5 Stars

 

The Pyle PL71PHB headrest comes with a 7 inch screen, a sleek black leather look, and excellent picture quality. With a 1400 x243 resolution, the unit is able to show widescreen movies with no black borders on the screen. The snazzy wireless headsets keep the noise levels coming from the back down while you drive.

Altogether, a great entry level headrest that gives a surprising level of quality for the price. Why pay more when these are this good? The only downside is that the color may not match all vehicle interiors, but if you have a darker shade of material on the vehicle seats then it matches up well. Recommended.

 

2) Power Acoustik DVD Headrest Set (8.8 inch Active Matrix TFT Monitors, model no: HDVD-9BG)
Our Rating: 4 out of 5 Stars

 

Canadian company Power Acoustik are well known for their inexpensive yet powerful subwoofers, and this headrest DVD set shows that they provide value for money in the back-seat-entertainment market too. These units can play DVD’s, MP4’s, DivX movies – just about anything you care to throw at it in fact. The USB and SD card readers are the preferred way of watching these formats, and thankfully the HDVD-9xx series can stream from these too – and all on an almost 9-inch screen. Add to this impressive media support great sound quality and the ability for each headrest to play separate video and audio (no more arguing in the back seat) and you have a winning product.

While the price point may be higher than the Pyle, it pales in significance when compared to other OEM headrests from Baton and Rosen ($1200 anyone?), making these a bit of a bargain for the feature set.

Overall, the Power Acoustik line represents some of the most flexible multimedia car headrests around. If only the instructions were a bit clearer this would be perfect, but once properly installed they are pretty hard to beat.

 

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Power Acoustik HDVD-73BG Headrest Review

Our Rating: 2 out of 5 Stars

The HDVD-73BG from Power Acoustik seems like a nice it should be ideal for anyone’s car ride home. Featuring a wide feature set, including built in FM transmitter and a compact 7 inch screen, initially when taken out of the box it seems as though this is a quality product. It’s well made and feels very solid, and the color and texture of the product seems very professional, as you would expect from a Power Acoustik product. Our friends at Sparco gave us a loan of the beige model to try out, but it also comes in two shades of gray, as well as black for you cool cats out there.

New-POWER ACOUSTIK HDVD-73BG 7Initial impressions are very favourable, with the unit displaying great picture quality with no obvious ghosting around the edges of the screen. The array of inputs and outputs on the unit really is quite impressing, with USB and SD cards accepted so the kids or whoever will be able play anything on their stick.

Media Formats

As far as video formats go, this unit appears to play just about anything you can throw at it, including PAL and NTSC DVD formats, DIVX and VCDs too for extra measure. It had a little bit of trouble with some high quality DivX’s I threw at it however, with a little bit of stuttering every couple of seconds. Now this could have been just down to the encoding used on the media file – I didn’t have any other divx videos to test on it before I had to give it back.

Installation was completed in 10 minutes; the headrest arms adjust quite easily once you get the hang of it but the useless one single page of instructions did not provide much use towards working it out. Thankfully I am MALE so I don’t read instructions anyway so I got there in the end, after realizing that I had to change the pole diameter.

The radio transmitter built in is ok, but it crackles a bit, probably due to interference with the car radio.

Picture Quality

OK, onto picture quality – it’s great. The 640 x 236 resolution screen is crystal clear and presented my movie of choice (The Incredibles) in vibrant color. Sound is also pretty good for one of these models.

Now the bad. When playing a DVD there seems to be some sort of rubbing noise within the casing – this can get quite distracting. Our friends at Sparco report that they have had to send a few back for scratching DVD’s, so perhaps I received one of the models that were affected. Regardless, this rubbing noise can be annoying, and if there are other reports of the unit damaging DVD’s then it is hard to recommend this model.

 

New-POWER ACOUSTIK HDVD-73BG 7
List Price: $255.26
Sale Price: $167.97
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days



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