Whether your living room is currently home to an HDTV or you're merely thinking of "someday," the DV2150 stands ready to deliver the full potential of your commercial 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. Even without an HD-ready set, users can set the component-video outputs to support interlaced video, which helps minimize line scan and digital artifacts on compatible TVs.

The model's four-head VCR, meanwhile, delivers smooth slow-motion play (forward and reverse) and clear still-frame images, while the hi-fi sound records and plays back stereo audio tracks. If you route the stereo output to an AV receiver, you can even enjoy four-channel (left, center, right, and monaural surround) Dolby Pro Logic mixes from TV and Dolby-encoded videocassettes. Other convenient VCR features include eight-event, one-year programming; a built-in 181-channel tuner; and auto clock and channel set.

In the DVD audio realm, the DV2150 includes a digital coaxial audio output that connects directly to a full-featured A/V receiver. Once connected, you can listen to enveloping Dolby Digital and DTS 5.1-channel home theater signals through a surround-sound speaker system. If you don't have a surround receiver, you can instead use the two sets of left/right RCA analo