Samsung DVD-S221 DVD Player
Fantastic picture, but awkward user-interface and remote
The Samsung S221 produces a superior picture for a budget-priced DVD player: gradiants are smooth with no banding or &quot;stairstepping.&quot; However, the remote control and user-interface are frustrating, even for an experienced DVD user.  For instance, to change the audio track (e.g., from English to English w/ commentary), you must first press the &quot;audio&quot; button and then press up and down or left and right to choose a different track.  The same is true for subtitles.  And strangely, with one DVD, the unit I had mistook my television for a widescreen TV, filling my tv screen with a distorted,  elongated image that occurs when you compress a widescreen image onto a standard tv set, as opposed to displaying the movie in letterbox format.  To correct this, I had to repeatedly enter the player's on-screen menu to specify my television's proportions (frustratingly, it didn't always remember this specification).  Furthermore, the &quot;screen-fit&quot; function, which some people prefer for filling their standard tv screens with the picture, as opposed to watching the movie in &quot;letterbox&quot; format, failed to function with several dvds.  While the picture on the S221 was very, very good, because the controls were so poorly designed and unreliable, I opted to return this player and keep a Hitachi (the DVP325U) that produced an inferior picture, but which had much simpler, reliable controls.