Whether your living room is currently home to an HDTV or you're merely thinking of "someday," the DVD-V2500 stands ready to deliver the full potential of 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. The DVD-V2500 also performs 3:2 pulldown. 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.

Using the Memory Stick interface, you can instantly transfer MP3 music files from portable media to hear favorite music through the full fidelity of a home-entertainment system. Digital photographers can show the whole family their work by removing the Memory Stick from a compatible camera and plugging it directly into the DVD-V2500. This is also a handy way to ferry MP3s from the computer to the living room.

The VCR delivers hi-fi stereo sound and quasi-S-VHS (QSPB) playback, which lets you view S-VHS cassettes--normally only playable on high-end S-VHS machines--in standard VHS resolution. Auto clock set saves hassle, and its dual-azimuth construction uses two pairs of recording heads rather than one, each optimized for a specific mode (one for SP recording, the other for EP).

Top-of-the-line component-video outputs (for DVD only) help mi