Samsung DVD711 DVD Player
Good but . . .
Firstly I must say that I don't know much about DVD players.  I've got no idea what an S composite monster cable 5.1 digital audio amorphic system is.  My roommate recently bought this DVD player and we hooked it up through normal RCA cables, the one gaming systems use.<br />The picture was great.  In fact it was awesome.  It was unbelievably crisp and slow motion and freeze frame also were amazingly clear.  The only complaint about the picture is that it's in widescreen and so the image seemed squashed as though the sides were pushed in making the people on the screen seem much more lanky and stretched.  Maybe there was a way to change this, but we couldn't figure it out.  Or maybe the DVD we were using just did this (MI:2).<br />The sound was normal, nothing at all special.  We have a normal TV with one cheesy speaker in it.<br />Now onto the features.  They were all pretty good.  The slow motion could go forward and in reverse.  The only thing is that there was no stepwise progression.  I used to use the slow mo button on my VCR to slowly progress through a scene by clicking the button and when I'd find something that interested me I'd leave it paused.  Here the slow mo is automatic and it progresses on it's own.  If you want to pause it during the slow mo you can't because the pause and play are the same button so I'd end up pressing play and the thing would not pause.  This was a pain especially since I wanted to locate something in the background of MI:2 and I couldn't.  The only way to do it was by using the 'jog dial' on the DVD player itself.  This was a cool feature because I could go through a scene stepwise by cycling the dial, unfortunately I could only move forward and not backwards.<br />The zoom was good, I suppose.  I used it just for the heck of it.  It was really useless.  And if you use the 4X zoom the picture is very fuzzy and blurry (and so it's pointless to zoom in that much).<br />Another feature is that it plays audio CDs.  This option was terrible.  We couldn't even get some sort of display on the TV to see what track we were on.  This info was listed on the LCD screen of the player.  Also there were no effects to accompany the music.  More expensive DVDs have a light show that replicate the sound level of the music by vibrating up and down, which is a cool effect.<br />With this player you just had a blank screen.<br />The last feature, the angle button which let's you view a scene from different angles (only if the DVD itself has it included) is a waste.  I thought it would be a cool option but then again it wasn't because not many DVDs actually have this option.<br />The coolest part about  owning a DVD player is the DVD movie itself.  The options on DVDs are really awesome.  I loved seeing behind the scene footages, documentaries, and other nifty things like that.<br />And so my advice is if you just want a simple DVD player and won't be creating your own home theater system, just buy a cheap one that can play all the DVDs (because I've heard that some players aren't able to pay them all).<br />I'll probably just buy a Playstation 2 since that has a no frills DVD player and it has a cool light show for audio CDs.  But then again I don't want to waste my time playing those video games, which I've become so sick of.  Oh well . . .