A few standard DVD player amenities are missing here, not the least of which is a flexible Zoom function. Being able to zoom any film is important for those with smaller TVs in which the standard letterbox format on many DVDs makes for too small an image. The PS2 does have a “4:3 Pan Scan” mode, which will fill the screen with the image (cutting off the widescreen ends), but since it is hidden within the basic setup menu, it is not easily accessible on the fly. Still, that setup menu does have a decent menu of controls for what amounts to an add-on feature to a game machine. It has two levels of noise reduction circuitry, which is supposed to clean up visual artifacts visible on some DVD transfers. It also has a sharpness control that emphasizes or softens the edges of images. This can be effective in reducing the little ghost lines that appear in many video images, and it did just this when I tried it out.

And since the PS2 is pitched at once to kids and adults, Sony felt compelled to build in a parental password system. On DVDs with adult content that are also encoded to work with parental protection systems, users are asked to enter their password before the disk will run. You can set the password or remove the option in the PS2 DVD Setup menu. Oddly, I never changed the password or disabled the security scheme myself, yet whenever faced with this password screen I found that hitting the X button four times just got me in. If you have forgotten your password, there is a universal override number you can feed the password screen as well. Sure, this is a nuisance for most adult users. But, frankly, given Hollywood and the gaming industry's cavalier “they're your kids not ours” attitude towards parental concerns with content, I have to give Sony a nod for this feature.

Since the PS2 can handle an optical cable, this DVD player can pass along to a Dolby Digital or DTS –capable receiver these signals from DVDs that use these systems. While at first I had trouble getting my receiver to recognize a DTS signal from the PS2 (Dolby Digital was no problem), I succeeded eventually. It is a matter of making sure the DTS option is turned on in the Setup submenu and that you have told the DVD you want to use that sound scheme. I have found in a number of DVDs, this can be trickier than it sounds. Even though you think you have set your DVD to play the DTS track on a disk, moving back and forth among other menus can sometimes rescind that order. This seemed to happen more often on the PS2 player than my standalone Tosh. Or, I am just a feeb, which is just as likely.

Now, many people suggest that all DVD players are basically alike, and while I hate to take the side of aficionados on this one, I respectfully disagree. According to the feature set of the player and on what equipment you are playing it back, there is a range of DVD player quality. It is not so much worse or better than it is the difference between good and great. Like most cheap DVD players, the PS2 provides a picture that looks excellent on most common TV monitors. I ran American Beauty, Matrix, some old cartoons, Heavy Metal, and a batch of other disks on both my Tosh DVD and my PS2. When it comes to basic image quality, I just saw no difference between the two players on my admittedly ancient TV, which is not so old that it can't resolve an S-VHS signal. I found none of the things I would expect to see in a shoddy player or a poorly passed video signal – poor edge sharpness, muddy blacks with poor image detail, color distortions, etc. Only two potential problems surfaced, and they were fleeting. In American Beauty, a few scenes showed a slight lip synch problem. This has come up in the past with some standalone DVD players. For many viewers it is not detectable at all because the synch is so minutely off, and it often only occurs in some DVDs. When it happens on some players, and with my American Beauty disk, it happens in select scenes. The other glitch was an occasional, ever-so-slight pause between chapters on a disk. This happened only on occasion. It was much worse when the Pelican remote was attached.