DVD portables................................................
zdnet.com
DVD Goes Portable
It's the closest thing to having a movie screen implanted in your brain. New portable DVD players from Panasonic, Samsung, and Sony aim to give you that blow-your-hair-back experience anywhere you travel.
Amazingly, they package DVD into a handheld size and still have both digital audio and component video out connections. That means you can easily hook up to your big screen when you're not on the road.
Panasonic's 2-pound (without battery) PalmTheater DVD-L10 released earlier this year, looks ultracool. It includes a tidy 5.8-inch "wide screen" LCD; a 4:3/16:9 zoom screen selector; and buttons for play, search, and pause. It also has onscreen function selections (repeat, resume, skip, search), both a built-in speaker and audio headphone jack, and a number of output ports.
This little wonder's size (6.3 inches square, 1.3 inches thick) is a travel bonus, no doubt, but it's also our biggest criticism. Unless you have PalmTheater on your knees (curled up in bed), its screen will leave you with a permanent squint.
However, new models from Samsung and Sony--under development at press time but available around now--should deliver almost everything the Panasonic provides, except the screen (and the squint). Both add eyewear as a window to your DVD world. These companies claim that strap-on headgear, such as Samsung's hi-res Double FLCD and Sony's Glasstron, offer a better mobile movie experience than a palm-size screen ever could. Whether that's true remains to be seen (literally).
|
