These prices, particularly the DVP-S560D that includes an integrated Dolby Digital 5.1 decoder in its $300 pricetag, offer great bargains for those seeking well-rounded players with strong featuresets.

Sharky Extreme opinion: Sony's new players represent evolutionary improvements to the DVD player genre, but offer nothing outstanding that isn't offered already by existing players by Toshiba and Panasonic.

We were most disappointed by a lack of disclosure by Sony regarding a 480p progressive scan DVD player that's rumored to be in the works for mid-2000, which was strange to us since five other companies were showing actual hardware progressive scan players on the show floor along with prices.

We'll define and talk about the 480p progressive scan revolution and what it means to DVD players later in this article.

Lexar Partnership: Introduced last year, Sony's proprietary storage medium, the "Memory Stick", has won praise by both consumers and the media alike.

The small "stick of bubble-gum"-sized memory sticks offer capacities from 4MB up to 64MB in everything from Sony digital cameras to MP3 players, and Sony plans to introduce 256MB memory sticks by the end of 2001 and 1GB memory sticks by 2003.

However, in order to satisfy customer needs, Sony has admitted that the current memory stick technology isn't up to par in terms of data transfer rates, so they've paired with flash memory producer Lexar in an effort to boost overall speed.

Lexar personnel told Sharky Extreme that consumers can expect a speed gain of between four to eight times the current memory stick average data transfer rate of 1.5MBs a second, with the goal being to allow users to download 80MB of information to a memory stick in approximately 10 seconds.

The new Lexar-enhanced Sony memory sticks will appear on the market in the second half of 2000.

Sharky Extreme opinion: More speed is needed for the memory stick to be an attractive alternative to other forms of storage media including DV videotape, prototype 2.5" MiniDVD-RAM discs, and Panasonic's new SD flash memory cards. The Lexar enhancement will deliver enough speed to allow 256 - 512MB memory sticks to offer competitive performance.