Panasonic DVD-S77S DVD Player
Wow!
Excellent upconverting DVD player!  I originally purchased the Toshiba SD-5970 with HDMI input to go with my new hdtv.  That machine was horrible!  You practically had to be right on top of the machine for the remote to work; even the buttons on the player itself had to be pushed very forcefully for them to register; the \\"upconverted\\" picture seemed no different than the standard progressive scan picture; it would freeze up.  Finally, after about two weeks, it totally died and would not work at all.   So, I returned it and ordered the Panasonic player from the internet.  What a difference for only a modest increase in price!  The remote works wonderfully, and the 1080i upconverted picture looks just beautiful.  The color saturation is so much better than with just a progressive scan picture.  I particularly noticed the difference when looking at closeups of women's faces.  Natalie Wood in \\"This Property is Condemned,\\" and Meg Ryan in \\"When Harry Met Sally\\" looked so beautiful in close up.  I took the Natalie Wood dvd out and put it in my Sony DVD recorder/player hooked to the same tv for a comparison, and there was just no comparison.  The colors were so much more brilliant with this Panasonic. <br /> <br />The Panasonic has some other really nice features, even if you're not interested in the upconverted picture.  You can memorize where you left off on as many as five dvds that you take out of the player.  When you put them back in, you'll be returned to the point where you stopped.  There are different picture settings, with varying amounts of contrast, brightness, etc, or you can set all that manually.  There are several different widescreen options, so you can zoom in to just the right size to fill your screen, depending on what aspect ratio the movie was originally shot in.  You can hear sound when you fast forward at the slowest fast forwarding speed.  This machine has other great features too, some of which were a bit over my head, such as different audio choices, and different color settings. <br /> <br />The instruction book was a bit confusing, as it didn't really explain what some of the more advanced settings were for;  nor was it set up in a very user friendly manner.  For example, it took me quite a while to figure out how to get the player to play with an upconverted signal.  I finally figured out that you had to hit the \\"display\\" button on the remote, then go to \\"other settings\\" then \\"picture settings,\\" or something like that.  Once I figured it out though, I was really, really pleased with this DVD player's quality.