Panasonic DVD-S55S Digital Remastering Progressive-Scan DVD , Silver
Nice DVD and DVD-R, Lousy JPEG and totally lacking S-Video
We justified the purchase of a new DVD player so that we could play back our JPEG photo disks and also our multi-album 'favorites' of MP3/WMA music disks, none of which our three year old DVD player can handle.<br />The Panasonic S55S was sent back within three days.<br />I tried out some of my DVD-R disks (Memorex 4X and 'Pro-Line' 1X) along with CD-R disks (Memorex 48X 80 Min) and they all worked flawlessly.<br />The reason for the return was two fold;<BR>1) No S-Video output; Until we upgrade our TV we have only analog or S-Video input available.  I used the enclosed analog video cable and got a really lousy picture.  Perhaps a better quality analog cable may have improved things, but I did not try one.  The picture quality was poor and was especially noticiable on still images such as titles, jpegs or the FBI warning screen.  <br />The DVD player had only nickel plated RCA-jack analog and component video outputs, plus right/left channel audio and a digital output.  No S-Video output was unacceptable.  I thought ALL units had that!<br />2) Slow and jerky JPEG playback.  When a CD with a lot of JPEGS from our five megapixal digital camera was inserted (average file size around 850k), the picture was displayed and the option for slide show became available.  Unfortunately, it took several seconds (probably only about five each, but it seemed like 30) for the image to slowly appear on the screen as though it was downloading from an old 14.4k dial-up internet connection.  Combine this slow picture display with a very fuzzy image and the experience was just sad.  <br />The unit may have technically met spec's, but it was not realistically usable and was a big step backwards from connecting our laptop to the TV via S-Video and looking at pictures that way! <br />Amazon took the unit back very easily. Kudos' to Amazon.