Panasonic DVD-S55 DVD Player

Absolutely an amazing little unit for the price. One of the few units that will support broad recordable DVD formats, so down the road as home made DVD's get more popular this unit will support them. But that's not the end of the benefits.

It also supports JPEG photos on DVD or CD-R, for slide shows of digital photographs right off your computer. It also supports WMV formats- windows media files, so if you catch trailers on the web and want to show them off at home you can, or even short, lo-res videos off of most digital cameras.

Of course none of this detracts from the images picture quality overall. Progressive scan leaves a clear image on digital and high definition tvs, (you can turn it on or off in the menu- and if you want to use it, make sure you grab a set of component cables, because that's the only progressive scan output on the device, as far as I can tell- and whatever you do, don't hook up the yellow "video out" wire *and* the component wire when you set it up, or you will be in a world of total video confusion. Just go with the component if you have it and you will be thrilled.)

No Coaxial Audio on the back should be no problem for most surround sound systems, since it does have a fiber optic connection and most 5.1 receivers have both, but make sure before you buy. And you'll need that cable, too.