Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)First, let me say this - if you actually pay the $899.99 MSRP you'll be wasting a LOT of money. If you've gone through the effort to look for reviews of this product, then do some dedicated searching and you'll find online stores selling this product for around $420 (as of March of 2008.)
At $420, this unit is a decent value. I bought this stereo because I took a new position that forces me to live away from home and travel 10-hours round trip on the weekends. I wanted something that would allow me to play MP3's from a memory drive instead of messing with CD's. This stereo has an SD card input and a remote unit which can be mounted under your dash or elsewhere (within about 3 feet of the headunit) which provides a USB slot among other inputs. The SC card drive seems to have its issues. Jensen claims it can read up to a 4GB card, but it won't read mine. I read in an online forum that you have to have a particular brand of SD card, but I cannot confirm that. In my opinion, a 4GB card should be a 4GB card and it shouldn't matter who made it. However, if I plug the 4GB card into a USB adapter and plug it into the USB slot, it works just fine.
My issues come with the user interface. MP3 titles (of which I use almost exclusively) only present the first 15-or-so characters of each title on the screen. This means you can either see the track title, or the artists name, but not both. I have had to create clever file-titling tricks so that I can find the song I want. (For those interested, I rename each MP3 with the artists's first initial, a dash, the song title, a space-dash-space, and the full artist name. Ex: M-Push - Matchbox 20") This of course forced me to rename 200 mp3's... As Kevin James once put it, "A lot of work for nooooot that much fun..." In addition, you cannot use the up/down buttons on the unit or remote to scroll through songs WHILE a song is playing. Instead you have to press tiny buttons on the touch-screen to scroll, which often results in scrolling too far, accidentally selecting a song instead of pressing the button, or hitting the stop button, which is very close to the down-arrow. This is not to say that the Touch screen is innacurate - it is in fact just the opposite. Some of the buttons however are just a little too small.
A few other annoying attributes - there is no "randomize" button on the unit. The unit will randomly scan through your MP3's, but you have to select "Random" from your remote control. I cannot fathom why they didn't give that option on the unit's face or screen. Sometimes the unit cannot decide whether to open its screen when you turn the car on - sometimes it will, sometimes it won't. The "autodim" feature seems completely inoperable. This forces you to change the brightness of the screen every day and night. The DVD player often seems to get confused, and sometimes will show disc errors or take at least a solid minute before beginning playback. This will cause you to insert a disc and forget that you did so by the time it starts playing. This especially seems to be an issue when the unit has gotten hot after extended use. The bluetooth interface with phones is easy to set up and use, but very limited in it's usage. I would like it to notify me when I receive text messages, and I have read (though not experienced) that if you have the volume low or muted, you will not hear when a phone call comes in.
Many users have complained about the screen being washed out by sunlight, but I say "What do you expect?" It's a screen. Take your TV or monitor outside in bright sunlight and tell me how well you can see it. Turn the brightness all the way up and tilt the screen down and you can usually see it well enough.
So why four stars? Well, this unit pretty much does everything it says it will do, and it does it pretty easily, without much fussing, and does it all at a reasonable price (again, read the first paragraph.) It has already provided plenty of entertainment during 20+ hours of driving and quite frankly, I still think it's "pretty cool." Find a product that does everything "just right" and you'll pay this unit's MSRP plus a lot more.
Do note that any desire to drive recklessly on the highway because you're watching "KITT" engage the Super Pursuit Mode on an episode of Knight Rider is not the fault of Jensen, myself, or David Hasselhoff.
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Jensen VM9512 7-Inch Motorized Touch-Screen Multimedia Receiver
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