Hitachi DVD Player With Component Output (DVP325U)
Excellent interface & remote; Good picture, but not perfect
For a price well under $100, the Hitachi DVP325U comes with a very sensible, easy-to-use remote and a decent picture.  It's remote control and user-interface are simple and intuitive.  For instance, to change the audio track (e.g., from English to English w/ commentary), you simply repeatedly press the \\"audio\\" button; other brands require you to first press an \\"audio\\" button and then press up and down or left and right to scroll through the various tracks (e.g., Samsung).  The DVP325U also contains quite a few features, including zoom, simulated surround-sound, a programmable remote (to control your TV's volume, etc.), and a jog-dial and control buttons on the face of the unit.  All of the features are well-executed; for instance, with the zoom function an onscreen display approximates which portion of the whole image is being enlarged.  Finally, the DVP325U has both optical and coaxial audio outputs for those playing the sound through a nice stereo system.  Despite an excellent interface and a lot of options that aren't usually available on cheaper DVD players, the DVP325U's picture is slightly less than perfect.  In movies, smooth gradiants tend to show some banding of color and \\"stair-stepped\\" edges and boundaries.  Generally this is only noticeable if you look very closely, but it makes an otherwise fantastic budget DVD player just short of perfect.  Overall though, the user-interface and the features were so well designed, that I opted to keep this DVD player over a similarly-priced Samsung player which had a top-notch picture, but difficult controls.  Lastly, the Hitachi DVP323U (threee-twenty-THREE), which you might also come across, is identical to the DVP325U, except that it lacks an optical output and 3 buttons (\\"subtitle,\\" \\"audio,\\" and \\"surround\\") on the face of the unit.