Portable DVD Players
Photo credit: Photo: Mk2010, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The backseat road-trip luxury before tablets existed. A portable DVD player strapped to the back of a headrest — or a dual-screen set for two kids — meant the family minivan finally had in-flight entertainment, as long as the disc didn't skip over every pothole.
The first portable DVD player was Panasonic's DVD-L10 in 1998. Early units were exotic and expensive — made only in Japan and retailing for over a thousand dollars — putting them well out of reach for most families. Screens were typically seven inches of TFT LCD, and the fancier designs could rotate 180 degrees and fold flat.
Through the 2000s, prices tumbled and the players became a road-trip staple. Parents clipped them to the front headrests, handed over a zippered wallet of DVDs, and bought the flimsy included headphones in bulk; twin-screen sets let siblings watch the same movie without fighting over one display. The one universal frustration: disc-based media hated bumps, so every pothole risked a freeze or a skip mid-scene.
The category never officially ended — you can still buy one for around forty dollars — but smartphones and tablets made it obsolete around 2010. For a stretch of the decade, though, the little folding screen glowing in a dark backseat was the whole reason a long drive was survivable.
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