Whether your living room is currently home to an HDTV or you're merely thinking of "someday," the DV-NC150U stands ready to deliver the full potential of your 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.

For simpler setups, a single composite-video jack channels signals from both the DVD player and the VCR, while the DVD player also offers an S-video connection for compatible TVs. Likewise, the DVD player and VCR share a single set of stereo analog (left/right) RCA audio outs, with DVD offering the flexibility of an additional set of stereo analog jacks and a coaxial digital-audio output for routing both Dolby Digital and DTS 5.1-channel surround-sound signals to a full-featured audio/video receiver.

This model's 4-head design ensures smooth slow-motion play (forward and reverse) and clear still-frame images, and with hi-fi sound the unit's VCR records and plays back stereo audio tracks. If you route the stereo output to an AV receiver, you can even enjoy 4-channel (left, center, right, and monaural surround) Dolby Pro Logic mixes from TV and Dolby-encoded cassettes. Other VCR features include auto rewind, auto repeat (great for trade shows), and auto/manual tracking adjustments.

Rapid Play spins a DVD at slightly faster or slightly slower than normal speed (approximately 1.3x to 0.8x normal speed) while maintaining normal pitch for the soundtrack. This feature works only with Dolby Digital-encoded DVDs. Resume play (DVD/CD) lets you resume playback from the point at which the player last stopped.