With the budget end of the DVD market getting painfully crowded and debilitatingly cut-throat, some respected manufacturers are shying away from it and thinking 'high end' instead. One of those is Marantz - and DVD players don't come much more 'high end' than the company's range topping DV9500.

Of course, £1,500 is a hefty price, but when you discover what it buys, you can understand.

Take, for instance, its build quality. The silver DV9500 auditioned (black is also an option) looks nothing short of imperious, thanks to the opulence of its metallic finish, ultra-slick disc slot and minimalist buttonry. It's also so phenomenally robust that you feel like you could run a tank over it without causing a dent. And its weight suggests all manner of premium grade components.

Connectivity hints further AV glories, too. Particularly eye-catching is an HDMI output for all-digital connection with a suitably-socketed screen. And as I would have hoped on such a top-line DVD deck, the HDMI output can be used to deliver 720p or 1080i images via onboard picture upscaling.

Accompanying this all-important HDMI jack are a set of component video outputs, an RGB-ready Scart, the usual - but in this company, eminently avoidable - composite and S-video options, coaxial and optical digital audio outputs, an RS232 port for custom installation integration, and a seriously spacious set of multichannel audio phono outputs. The space between each line out is necessary to accommodate Marantz-engineered 'HDAM' discrete circuit boards provided for each individual channel.

Universal spinner

Features beyond those already mentioned are numerous. The most significant, however, is the DV9500's universal disc playback, meaning it can handle Super Audio CD and DVD-Audio discs as well as the usual DVD-Video and CD flavours.

But also registering interest are its progressive scan output, onboard DTS and Dolby Digital decoding, serious 216MHz/14-bit video D/A conversion, full 192kHz/24-bit audio conversion, multiple picture adjustments and a lip-sync corrector. Yes, this thoughtful little beauty allows you to introduce variable delay between the picture and sound from the DV9500 to compensate for any lip-sync issues generated by your screen (a problem with some LCD, DLP and plasma devices).

It's also worth mentioning that the DV9500 carries a completely new feature - DTS 96/24 and Dolby Headphone processing. This aims to recreate a 5.1-channel soundstage from just an ordinary set of headphones, without causing 'listener fatigue'.

Thankfully, the DV9500 doesn't undermine all of its front-end finery with a slip-shod performance. Far from it. I've been reviewing DVD players - loads of them - since DVD first appeared, so it takes a lot to shock me these days. But that's precisely what the DV9500's pictures did. For the first hour of my review I was transfixed by its images.

Perhaps their most outstanding characteristic is sharpness. Using either the HDMI or component output (and surely nobody spending this much on a DVD deck would use anything less) I think you'd have to pay significantly more to see a DVD picture look more sublimely textured or finely detailed. The tiniest weave in the most subtle of suits, for instance, is immaculately rendered, faces have layers of character and scenes have tangible depth as backgrounds become clearer and richer - highly impressive.