Choose to listen from the unit's built-in stereo speakers or its headphone jack and supplied earbud headphones. Best of all, perhaps, the unit's four-hour battery life gives you enough juice to watch two full-length movies. Full format compatibility includes everything from standard NTSC DVD-Video to PAL- and P-SCAN-formatted discs, audio CD, VCD, SVCD, CD-R, CD-RW, CD-ROM, JPEG CD, MP3 CD, DVD+R, DVD+RW, DVD-R, and DVD-RW.

Whether your living room is currently home to an HDTV or you're merely thinking of "someday," the CH-LDV 712 stands ready to deliver the full potential of DVDs when used in a home-theater environment. 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 player also performs 3:2 pulldown through its progressive-scan output. DVD mastering introduces a common distortion when adjusting 24 frames-per-second movies to 30 fps video; 3:2 pulldown digitally corrects this distortion, removing the redundant information to display a film-frame-accurate picture.

Other connections include S-video and composite-video outputs (composite-video is switchable as an input), and a switchable analog audio input/output. An optical digital-audio output lets you hook the player up with an audio/video receiver and multichannel speaker system to enjoy immersive DTS or Dolby Digital 5.1-channel surround from your discs (optical digital-audio interconnect not included).