The DVD player itself offered perfect performance from what we could tell by running through the Matrix a half-dozen times. There was not jittering or any digital distortion to speak of. The player offers several features to customize how the picture is displayed should you want to fiddle with it. Among the options are Letter box, Pan-scan, or wide. It is also possible to force the image to fit to the screen and even digitally zoom up into the picture.

Personally, we were just happy to crank up the volume and 'have' to watch the Matrix over and over. :-) Overall it is the ability of this player to output clean, clear, and fluid images that will be the major draw - though the ability to play CD's of MP3 files is also a major factor.

The Nuon technology is an added bonus, but since the technology is still in the beginning stages of market penetration it is really going to be limited to the non-gaming applications is can supply the DVD-player. There are a dozen or so games currently on the market for Nuon, and from what the fan sites have been saying, more are on the way. It is important to remember that the DVD-N501 is not attempting to compete with the likes of Sony and the playstation 2 however.

All in all, this is a rather cool little DVD-player with a lot of hidden extras under the hood. The only lacking point we could really see was the slightly awkward control for navigating through the onscreen menus - but that is really a minor point.