Gateway Your plasma-TV dreams have a little room to grow now that Gateway's 50-inch GTW-P50M203 flat-panel HDTV monitor is on the scene. Not only can the 1,366 x 768-pixel screen bring you true high-def images, but the widescreen set is only $7,000.
Marantz When you've got the Marantz DV8400 DVD player, you can stop worrying about format incompatibility. This THX Select player attains "universal" status by playing DVD-Audio discs and Super Audio CDs and is said to provide full bass management for both formats.
Illustration by Rick Wessler Confused about HDTV? Well, it can be hard to find somebody who isn't - which is why I recently had a consultation with my esteemed colleague, Dr. Hidef, who isn't the tiniest bit perplexed when it comes to high-definition TV.
PanasonicIt's a tough call: do you want a hard-drive video recorder so you can save TV shows without disc clutter, or a DVD recorder so you can keep your recordings forever? Panasonic's DMR-E80H gives you both options in a single package.
Photos by Tony Cordoza With all of the home theater toys out there, our inner child can't help but continually drool. But when it comes to being an adult and figuring which ones you can actually buy with the cash (or credit card) at hand, it can get to be pretty daunting.
Zenith Want a taste of DVD-Audio? Hey, at this price, why not? Zenith's affordable DVB252 five-disc DVD changer can handle the format, feeding high-res audio to your receiver or preamp through its multichannel analog audio output. And if you're sometimes in the mood for compressed audio, the player also reads MP3 and Windows Media Audio (WMA) files on CD-Rs and CD-RWs.
Fujitsu It's a whole new look for Fujitsu's Plasmavision. The 42-inch P42VHA20 has a lighter silver finish than previous models and front-panel controls discreetly located in the bottom righthand corner. It's also just 3 inches thick.
Denon The first universal player from Denon, the DVD-2900 will play both DVD-Audio discs and Super Audio CDs, and it has Dolby Digital and DTS decoders, too.
Go-Video To get all your computer's digital pictures and media clips over to your A/V system you'll need some kind of complicated newfangled interface contraption, right? Nope-all you need is Go-Video's D2730 DVD player, which can connect to your PC either through its PC Card Ethernet adapter or wirelessly with an optional Wi-Fi PC Card.
JVC No room for one more component in your rack? How about half of one? At 2 1/4 inches thick, JVC's XV-N5SL DVD player won't crowd anyone. It still does everything a chubbier player can do, including deliver progressive-scan images through its component-video output and perform 2:3 pulldown to compensate for frame-rate differences between video and film.
