4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Generally a good unit, but has a couple shortcomings, April 8, 2009
By D. Edwards (Nashville, TN United States) - See all my reviews
I have had this unit for about a week now, and generally it's a pretty impressive unit. I also purchased the Pioneer GEX-P10HD HD Radio Tuner for Pioneer HD Radio-Ready Head Units, the Pioneer CD-BTB200 Bluetooth Wireless Adapter, and the Pioneer Car CDIU200V 2 Meter USB iPod Cable for AVH-P4100DVD.
Installation:
Installation for the product was generally clear. I am using the unit in a 1999 Nissan Altima. Had plenty of room for all three pieces either below the stereo or below the steering column.
AUX Inputs:
You'll need to buy an 1/8" headphone extension cable if you plan to use the aux input to connect to a normal player since the AUX input is in the back of the unit. You can also use a normal RCA stereo to 1/8" cable like for a home stereo as well. The unit accepts both and you can use them for different units, so you can have an ipod hooked up and another player at the same time.
Video Quality:
* Album covers from ipods are okay. A bit fuzzy, but okay.
* DVDs look awesome on this unit. Every bit of what you'd want. Plenty of control options. I have no complaints on this one.
* Color on the screen is bright and easy to read and selecting things on the screen is also easy. It's a senstive touch, so I never have to press hard. Most of the text is very large, so it's easy to read and select on the screen in a moving car. Has a clean look, will be impressive to passengers, but when off, nothing that makes it look fancy (in my ideal world hopefully that'll reduce theft potential). If you go to the Pioneer Electronics website, they have many more images of the screens. And the unit looks just as good in real life as it does in those pictures.
Sound Options:
* EQ is parametric, only three bands, but it allows you to choose what frequency and how many frequencies on either side of that one are affected. Provides enough flexibility if you may be used to a 7 or 10 band EQ like I am.
* Also, for external players, the feature that compensates for MP3 compressed audio is great. Really helps improve the sound from ipods.
* The Loudness feature has three intensity levels--quite helpful since on some units the difference between it being on and off can be crazy.
* The sub woofer settings allow you to choose the sub frequency you want to accent or reduce--assuming you have one with an external amplifier connected.
* Clock is only military time with no option to change it to am or pm. And it has a "just" option that drops the minutes and rounds the hours up or not. At least in the U.S., why would someone want to know a rounded hour. Not sure how that helps with anything.
Radio:
* The automatic station presets (BSM) only work in each preset group. Each group only has 6 options. So, you can't have it find the top 18 strongest signals. For example, if you use BSM setup for FM set 1, and then do the same for FM set 2, they have practically the same stations in them.
* HD radio is great, but when selecting presets, it doesn't insert the name of the station like it does with normal FM. All you see is P1, P2, etc. And I have yet to find a way to manually add it in. I don't expect to. If you use the HD unit, the normal radio functionality in the unit is disabled. You can still get the analog signals, it just works a little differently. It seems like they forgot to dot a few i's. But it switches back and forth between the analog signal and digital signal pretty well. With strong FM signals, I really can't tell much of a difference. Generally speaking, I probably wouldn't buy this item again if I had