If you're willing to pay $80 to $100 for a DVD player, you can get famous name brands like Panasonic, Sony, Toshiba, and JVC. I saw DVD players from Samsung and Magnavox that cost slightly less. The DVD players with the famous name brands are generally more likely to be reliable that those bearing lesser known brand names, and they typically include more features, although those features may not be ones you care about. So far I've discussed only DVD players that hold a single disc, but there are also DVD players that can hold multiple discs. People ordinarily buy a multi-disc DVD player because they want it to double as a music CD player. This works because all the currently available DVD players can also play music CDs. Although you can buy jukeboxes that hold up to, say, 400 discs, a typical multi-disc DVD player accommodates five discs. I saw DVD players made by Samsung, Panasonic, and Sony with five-disc changers, and they were priced in the $80 to $180 range.
Earlier I mentioned the cables that come packaged with most DVD players, and these usually terminate with three jacks, which are called composite jacks or RCA jacks. Two of these jacks are for audio, and the third, which is always coded yellow, is for video. Now what you should be aware of is that if your TV provides a place for S-video input, you'll get a better picture if you use that instead of the composite video input. All of the DVD players I looked at support S-video, but most don't automatically supply the necessary cable, so you'll probably have to buy it separately.Furthermore, if your TV set provides a place to plug in component video jacks—which are three jacks that separate out red, green, and blue—you can get an even better picture than you can get with S-video. Most, but not all, of the DVD players I looked at support component video, and again, you'll probably have to buy the cable separately. I suppose I should tell you that many DVD players provide support for features that most people still have not thought much about, such as CD-R/CD-RW/MP3, video CDs, audio DVDs, interactive games, and karaoke. You'll just have to decide on your own which, if any, of these features are important to you when buying your first DVD player. If you're one of the relatively few people who have a digital, high-definition TV, you'll want to be sure to buy a DVD player that offers a feature called progressive scan. This will give you a slightly sharper picture. However, on ordinary TVs, it's doubtful that progressive scan will make any visible difference. Actually, progressive scan capability came standard on all the famous-name brands of DVD players I looked at.
If you're really into sound when you're watching a movie at home, you'll have to think about how the DVD player you're going to buy will fit in with your sound system, which will presumably consist of five or six speakers. But this means that you're into home theater, which is way beyond the scope of this little article, and I'm not qualified to offer you any help.
Finally, you may need to be aware of the fact that, generally speaking, DVD players bought in one geographical region (say, Europe) will not play a DVD bought in another geographical region (say, the United States). However, it is possible to buy "region-free" DVD players, that is, DVD players that will play most DVDs bought in any geographic region. Particularly for those of you who live outside Region 1—which consists of the entire U.S. plus all of Canada—you might want to think about whether or not this is an important feature for you.
