Whether your living room is currently home to an HDTV or you're merely thinking of "someday," the SD-4900 stands ready to deliver the full potential of DVDs. Progressive scanning, referred to as 480p for the number of horizontal lines that compose the video image, creates a picture using twice the scan lines of a conventional DVD picture, giving you higher resolution and sharper images while eliminating nearly all motion artifacts.

The SD-4900 also performs 3:2 pulldown. DVD mastering introduces a common distortion when adjusting 24 frames-per-second movies to 30 fps video; 3:2 pulldown digitally corrects this distortion. Conventional composite- and S-video outputs bring compatibility with nearly any television. The "expanded" mode in the player's black-level setting produces richer, deeper black tones in every image. PLUGE (Picture Line Up Generation Equipment) delivers black as well as below-black signals to a television.

DVD-Audio offers super high-fidelity (192 kHz/24-bit) sound. DVD-Audio discs provide multichannel and stereo sound, incredible storage capacity, and unique bonus materials not available on regular audio CDs. Because the DVD-Audio signal is too high-resolution for the digital-to-analog converters in current surround receivers (and also as an anti-piracy measure), the SD-4900 performs its own decoding of DVD-Audio signals, passing high-resolution analog, not digital, audio to your surround receiver. This means you'll need an audio/video receiver with multichannel analog-audio inputs to appreciate this feature.

A set of left/right analog-audio outputs channel audio to Dolby Pro Logic receivers and stereo televisions. Both Dolby Digital and DTS 5.1-channel surround-sound signals can be routed through the player's digital-audio outputs (one each coaxial and optical) for direct connection to a digital AV receiver, and with these formats the choice is yours: route the surround signal digitally or use the same analog outputs you use for the DVD-Audio signal.

Playback options include 3-D DNR (digital noise reduction, which reduces random noise in DVD images by comparing each frame of information to the previous and succeeding frames), bookmarks, a powerful 16x picture zoom, and parental lock.

EAM (Enhanced Audio Mode) offers three audio-enhancements: "normal" mode equalizes regular digital-audio signals; "3-D" provides virtual surround sound through Spatializer N-2-2 circuitry; and "Dialogue" enhances the center-channel frequencies when you're playing Dolby Digital-encoded discs via the D-R1's analog audio outputs.

What's in the Box
DVD player, remote control, remote batteries, a user's manual, and a stereo analog audio interconnect/composite-video cable.