Feature PACKED low priced DVD player.

Author's Rating:

Pros: Optical 5.1 output, Progressive Scan, Versatile, Beautiful video.

Cons: Tv's equipt with only coaxial video in. require you buy an rf modulator.

The Bottom Line: 
Definitely worth every last cent, I hooked up my 5.1 surround sound speakers through the optical jack and it was AWESOME!!!

Author's Review
There's alot to be said of the Philips DVD724AT so I broke it up into sections.

Jacks
Digital audio output via coaxial and optical jacks, 2 sets of RCA L/R audio outputs, S-video, as well as component and composite video outputs.

Supported media
Jpeg slideshows, MP3 cd's, Audio CD's, Vcd's, Svcd's, HDCD's, and of course DVD's. It plays CD-R's and CD-RW's.

Menu
The menu has options such as 3 different brightness settings for the front panel lcd and you can also turn it off completely, also there's a brightness setting for the DVD you're currently watching (0 by default, also has +1 +2 +3 +4, -1 -2 -3 -4) Menu languages only include english and chinese. There's a movies rating option to disable playback of movies with a certain rating (such as Rated-R, Rated-NC-17, etc.) or alternatively you can "Lock" certain movies but in either case you'll need the password to view blocked material. There's an NTSC or PAL option, There's even a screen saver. The menu is organized well, so it's easy to find everything... but it looks a little bit bland (would've been nice if it had little pictures of tv's and speakers and things like that).

Remote
I like the remote's size and how it fits in my hand, it's not bulky like my universal remote.
up is Slow Forward
down is Slow Reverse
right is Fast Forward
left is Rewind
all four of these buttons cycle through different speeds (2x 4x 6x 8x)
instead of letting the player do the slow motion for you, you can just keep pushing the pause button to do "frame by frame" which is just that... one frame at a time. In zoom mode you can pan around with up/down/left/right and do frame by frame (this also works in Repeat mode). Remote features the following buttons that not all DVD players are capable of doing, Angle, Zoom, Repeat, Repeat A-B. Repeat has 3 modes (repeat chapter, repeat title, off) Repeat A-B is different (press once to program where video starts repeating, press again to program where video stops repeating than just sit back and watch the video repeat itself press the button a third time to cancel and return to just watching the movie normally) Zoom has 3 settings (x2 x4 and off)