the umd drive was for me what killed it. a brand new storage medium available no where else. and they want us to buy media in this format? when vcd was becoming increasingly popular at the time never mind dvd.
sony makes beautiful hardware, some of the best. but they destroy it with bad practices like cd players that can't read cd-rs. digital music players that weren't mp3. they became about protecting their copyright and not doing what their customers wanted.
For a while, I had a SONY CD Changer in my car. You ever see the scratched up CDs often sold at flea markets for a buck each or less?
Many computers and players won't read them.
But that SONY does. And not only does it read them, the thing takes a bit longer to buffer due to all the scratches and massive error correction it has to do while buffering...
But once it does all that, it will play the disc flawlessly! Bumpy roads, too cold, too hot, disc too scratched?
All pretty much no problem.
I would gladly buy another. Was that good, but it won't read ANY recordable format.
Bummer.
It went with the car when I sold it. I put some of the very worst discs I had ever seen in it for demo purposes too.
Dude that bought the car loved it like I did. I did not mention CD-R largely because the player was going with the car no matter what.