Panasonic DVD-LV50 5 in. Portable DVD Player

Now you can take your home theater with you--or at least a miniature version of it. The Panasonic DVD-L50 PalmTheater lets you watch DVDs on the road, at a friend's house, or wherever you feel the urge for entertainment.
The DVD-L50 PalmTheater's sleek steel construction looks great and provides added durability. Panasonic has done a great job of miniaturizing both screen and speakers without sacrificing too much quality. The virtual surround sound is impressive for such small speakers, although it definitely leans toward the high end, making some sounds too shrill or tinny. The sound improves drastically with headphones.

The picture is fairly good with an adequate viewing angle to either side--not what you'd get on a TV, of course, but still good enough to sit through for an entire movie. The DVD-L50 lets you choose between 4:3 and 16:9 aspect ratios at the touch of a button. It also offers a zoom mode that lets you fill the screen with a 4:3 picture, although you tend to get a rather pixellated image. (We found that we preferred the smaller but sharper non-zoom mode.)

The DVD-L50 provides video and digital audio outputs and can be hooked up to a larger home-theater setup. It strikes us as a good choice to take to a friend's house to watch DVDs or to use with hotel TVs on trips. It does have about a two-hour battery life, so you could conceivably watch a whole DVD without being hooked up to an AC outlet (on a plane, for instance). You can also use it as a portable CD player, with or without headphones.