Panasonic DVD-F87S 5 Disc Progressive Scan DVD Player, Silver

The five-disc changer allows you to keep up to five discs of any format in your player at the same time. A front-loading rotary carousel lets you change any of the four not-playing discs without disturbing what you're watching or listening to. The Audio/JPEG onscreen navigation menu enables you to quickly search for MP3 and WMA audio files or view JPEG images recorded onto CD-R and CD-RW discs via an onscreen menu. This feature also works with CD-R discs that feature multisession recordings.

The HighMAT (High-Performance Media Access Technology) feature, codeveloped with Microsoft, is a digital-media standard that provides a dramatically improved method of storing, arranging, and playing back personal digital photo, music, and video collections on recordable discs such as CD-RW media.

Panasonic's Depth Enhancer noise-reduction feature only processes an image's background, helping to leave the delicate details of the main subject intact and providing sharp images with incredible depth. The DVD-F87S uses a 54 MHz/10-bit video digital-to-analog converter, which reduces digital artifacts to give you a better picture.

When you play DVD movies encoded with DTS or Dolby Digital soundtracks, the built-in decoder processes all six channels of audio information (left front, right front, center, left-surround, right-surround, and low-frequency effects) without the need for an external decoder, and with the right audio components, lets you enjoy the amazing fidelity of discrete 5.1-channel surround sound. The decoder also allows you to control speaker configuration.

Other features include picture control (brightness, color, contrast, gamma correction, and sharpness), disc program play, and disc random play.

Tech Talk
Progressive scan: Progressive scanning, otherwise known as 480p ("p" for "progressive"), creates a picture signal with double the scan lines of a conventional interlaced picture, or 480i, to create a noticeably sharper image. Standard DVD-Video players use interlaced scanning to produce a picture. Interlaced scanning combines two fields to generate a picture of 525 scan lines (480 of which are displayed). Your television projects an interlaced image by first scanning the 240 odd-numbered lines of one field (in 1/60th of a second), followed by the 240 even-numbered lines of the other field (in 1/60th of a second). A progressive video processor enables all 525 lines (480 of which are displayed) to be scanned at the exact same time. A television with 480p component inputs can completely scan the entire image in 1/60th of a second, so it only takes one field to build one frame of video.

What's in the Box
Panasonic DVD-F87S five-disc changer, remote control, 2 AA batteries, AC power cord, composite A/V (RCA) cable, and printed operating instructions.