Philips DVD580M Lifestyle DVD Player
exceeded expectations
This DVD player continues to surprise me more than one year after ownership. The vertical mount is great, it is one of the few players that has the 5.1 multichannel out to use with Dolby Digital Ready receivers. The setup page offers powerful settings such as hi res or no flicker picture modes, angle mark, S video AND component out, you can turn individual audio channels on and off, you can mixdown multiple channels into two, adjust center and rear delay, test tone, it even has a dyanamic range compression which is great for watching movies that have loud explosions and such late at night. The component out gives you near progressive scan quality in my opinion, but the best feature for me is DTS, I am using the DVD580M optical out connected to a Logitech Z-680 speaker system which is DTS, THX, and Dolby Digital ready. Put in a copy of the newly released Apollo 13, disc 2 (the IMAX version), turn on DTS decoding in Languages and you will see and hear what this DVD player can do. WOW. The only issue I have had with this player is there is a delay when switching layers, sometimes and I stress sometimes, the delay exceeds 5 seconds. Other that that, it is awesome, I know this is a discontinued product but I had to write a review in case someone is looking for a used DVD player.