With Akai's slim DVDRW120 DVD player/recorder you can share your home videos with friends and family, relieve your VCR of its TV taping duties, and enjoy quality home entertainment on either standard or high-definition televisions. The unit's convenient inputs include a front-panel IEEE 1394 digital-video (DV) jack, through which you can transfer and assemble your most treasured footage, archive all your old video tapes, or burn video from your PC straight to high-capacity, rewritable DVD+RW. Inclined to take your deck overseas? Go right ahead: it's compatible with NTSC, PAL, and SECAM video systems and offers a wide-range power supply (AC 100 to 240V, 50/60 Hz) for just that purpose.

You can also use the DVDRW120 like a VCR, burning televised programs directly to disc. DVD+RW discs require no finalizing--you can record, eject, and play them with minimal fuss, thanks to "background formatting." This feature, which lowers total burning time, is an advantage over the "dash" formats. Other DVD+RW advantages include on-disc content editing and multisession writing. And, because of DVD+RW and DVD+R's compatibility with most existing DVD players, they're a great way for you to share your special memories with family and friends.

Four recording modes (HQ, SP, LP, and EP) let you scale the quality of your recordings to suit your taste or fit your media, and Akai's Easy Track navigator simplifies access to your favorite scenes.

The DVDRW120 is also a first-rate DVDplayer, featuring progressive-scan video outputs, Dolby Digital 5.1-channel surround sound passthrough, MP3 CD playback (CD-R/CD-RW), JPEG image CD playback, and compatibility with most DVD media (including video-mode DVD-R and DVD-RW).

Whether your living room is currently home to an HDTV or you're merely thinking of "someday," the DVDRW120 stands ready to deliver the full potential of your DVDs. Progressive scanning, referred to as 480p for the number of horizontal lines that compose the video image, creates a picture using twice the scan lines of a conventional DVD picture, giving you higher resolution and sharper images while eliminating nearly all motion artifacts. Also for use with high-definition displays is an optional DVI (digital visual interface) output with HDCP copy protection, which affords a direct digital connection with your display.

Top-of-the-line component-video and outputs help minimize digital and line-scan artifacts on compatible advanced televisions, while composite- and S-video inputs and outputs bring compatibility with nearly any video component and television monitor. Audio inputs consist of 2-channel analog jacks with up to 24-bit analog-to-digital conversion.

A set of left/right analog-audio outputs channel audio to Dolby Pro Logic receivers and stereo televisions. Dolby Digital 5.1-channel surround-sound signals can be routed through the player's digital-audio outputs (one each of RCA coaxial and Toslink optical) for direct connection to a full-featured audio/video receiver.