Panasonic DVD-A320 DVD Player
Panasonic.  Just slightly ahead of their time...
I've had this player for close to a year now, and it's an absolutly amazing piece of equipment.  I'm very picky with things like this, and this was my third DVD player.  I'd previously returned an RCA player, and a  Hitachi player before settling on this one.  No disapointment whatsoever.   Great for those of us with a 6-ch input receiver, but no built in decoder  in the amp.  It gives you the ability to adjust almost every different  aspect of the picture right on the player.  You can adjust the volume and  delay on every individual speaker, as well as tell it what size your  speakers are.  If you like lots of surround sound effect, just hook up some  decent speakers, and tell the player to crank up the surround sound volume.   Likewise for the subwoffer setting.  The remote is GREAT and gives very  easy to use features.  While I'm completly satified with this player,  here's my complaints with it...<br />1. it's only a 2x player, so when you  fast forward in double speed, you can see every frame being played, but  beyond that, it must skip frames to advance rapidly.  Computer DVD-ROM's  come at 12x already, so I think they could have made it faster.  As it is,  the player will advance anywhere from 2x to 100x in fast forward mode  depending on your prefrence.<br />2. The dual layer DVD's give a VERY BRIEF  pause while switching layers.  Almost all players do this, but it'd be nice  it the manufacturers would use a buffer to avoid the pause completely.<br />3.  The &quot;illuminated remote&quot; is glow in the dark buttons that you  can't see after the light's been off for more then 3 or 4 mintes.  It'd  have been nice if the remote was back-lit with an actual light inside.<br />4.  The 1999 Hitachi and most 1998 Sony DVD players had dual laser pick-ups.   The picture was read with one laser, and the audio with the other.  This  makes no noticable difference in the quality of viewing movies, but only  players with the dual laser pickup will play CD-R discs like theones you  make in your computer's CD writer.  Hitachi, since dropper the dual laser  from it's player, and Sony now only has it on their top-of-the-line  model.<br />5. If you stop the movie and do a picture or audio adjustment in  the configuration menu, you have to manually re-find the spot you were at  in the movie.  If you just hit 'stop' and 'play' the player automatically  goes back to where you were when you hit stop.<br />  These are just small  complaints, and for what it's worth, this is an awesome player.