Panasonic DVD-L50 Portable DVD Player
Astounding, worth every penny.
I ordinarily wouldn't consider myself to be a gadget freak, but knowing I had an 8 hour flight to Hawaii coming up, I decided to buy this as a birthday present for myself.  All I can say is &quot;wow&quot;.  This is hands down the greatest electronic gadget I've ever owned.<br />Now that I've  had the unit a few months, I thought I would share my thoughts.  First,  although a number of people have complained about overheating (and it does  get hot), I have watched nearly 100 DVDs and not had a single problem.  The  battery life is adequate (3 hours as advertised) which is fine for just  about everything.  However, I would definitely recommend getting a second  battery ($150).  For one, this is nice on long trips. More importantly  however, it takes nearly 6 hours to recharge the battery--making it  impossible to simply jack into an outlet during a layover and get a fresh  charge (sigh). Finally, in comparing this to a laptop computer, I find that  the display on the L50 is much brighter and crisper than that on my laptop  (so crisp in fact, that if you look closely, you can sometimes see slight  artifacts left by movie special effects such as wire removal in action  shots).  Also, there's no way I would be able to use my laptop and eat an  in-flight meal at the same time (something that is easy with the L50).<br />My  only complaints with the unit are the long battery recharge time (see  above) and the fact that it is sometimes difficult to get enough headphone  volume on noisy flights.  I'm not sure if this is really a problem with  the L50--movies seem to have a lot more dynamic variation than a music CD  (and I suspect that listening to classical music on my discman would be  equally difficult in this environment).<br />The only other minor gripe (which  is not related to the L50 specifically ) is that non-anamorphic DVD's look  absolutely terrible on the 16x9 widescreen.  This is because a  non-anamorphic widescreen disc shows up as a small letterbox inside a 4x3  square in the middle of the display (utilizing only a little more than 50%  of the available display space).  Although it is possible to blow this up  to fill up the entire screen, the resulting image looks fairly pixelated  due to the lower source resolution.  The bottom line: make sure that you  look for discs that are labeled as &quot;anamorphic&quot; or &quot;enhanced  for wide screen TV.&quot; Most new releases fall into this category  although a few studios (such as Disney) still haven't gotten the  point.<br />Overall, great unit.  I love it.x3  square in the middle of the display (utilizing only a little more than 50%  of the available display space).   Although it is possible to blow this up  to fill up the entire screen, the resulting image looks fairly pixelated  due to the lower source resolution.  The bottom line: make sure that you  look for discs that are labeled as &quot;anamorphic&quot; or &quot;enhanced  for wide screen TV.&quot; Most new releases fall into this category  although a few studios (such as Disney) still haven't gotten the  point.<br />Overall, great unit.   I love it.