Display adjustments include brightness, contrast, color, and hue. There is also a dimmer adjustment that has three separate memories: one for bright sunlight, one for twilight, and one for nighttime. This dimmer is independent of the "illumination" line that is hardwired to the headlight switch and controls only the brightness of the sub-display, located on top of the screen. The brightness and contrast adjustments also store two separate settings for day vs. night lighting conditions. Several different widescreen modes can be selected, mainly for enlarging a standard 4:3 video signal to the native 16:9 format of the screen. One of these, called JUST (for Justify), expands the picture horizontally in a graduated way with more stretch at the edges to reduce the perception of image distortion (similar to a wide angle lens). The Entertainment button switches background wallpapers, animated level meters, and short movie loops (race cars, dolphins, etc.), and can also display the current video source during audio playback.
Below the screen is a half-height removable (for security) faceplate that contains the volume knob and the selection joystick that you can use for manual seek tuning, fast forward and reverse, and to navigate the menus. Also on the faceplate are several buttons for the main functions that are heavily accessed, in most cases providing shortcuts so you don't have to go to the menu system. The DVD slot is at the top of this mini-faceplate.
With half of the dash-mounted unit taken up by the display screen, there is not nearly enough room to house the electronics needed, so there is a hideaway unit you must mount in a separate location. This unit is a rectangle about 11x7 inches by just over an inch tall. Two 3-meter-long multi-conductor cables with large proprietary connectors carry all of the signals that need to travel between the two units. The main audio outputs and secondary function leads (illumination, antenna power, external amp remote turn-on, and cell phone mute) come from the main head unit, and connections to other external devices are made at the hideaway unit.
A great little remote is included that has essentially all of the controls replicated on it, including the selection joystick. On the side of the remote is a slide switch that changes its operation when you are viewing a DVD or watching the TV tuner.
The DVD player works in a similar fashion to the familiar home DVD, with the notable exception of a "preferences" menu system that lets you choose defaults for DVD playback. With this menu you can specify, for example, that you always want to see subtitles and hear playback in Spanish (if they exist on the disc) and that you want to lock the aspect ratio into letterbox mode (which you may want to do if you have a second display in the rear that is not widescreen capable). There is also a Parental Lock option on this menu with eight levels of censorship to choose from that will skip scenes deemed too violent or sexy for kids (function must be programmed into the DVD disc itself). The player supports multi-angle discs, allowing you to change the camera angle in certain scenes, and anamorphic resolution enhancement. As with all commercial DVD players, the unit will only play discs that are coded for the region of the world in which it will be used (in this case, Region 1, which is USA and Canada). There are decoders for both Dolby Digital and DTS surround formats. Playback control has the usual features of pause, slow motion and frame-by-frame play, skipping to the next title and/or chapter, and the ability to search for a specific time index. Buttons are provided for changing the audio and subtitle languages on the fly (during playback). There is also support for dynamic range control when using Dolby Digital, a feature that reduces the dynamic range (the difference between loud and quiet sounds) for playback at lower levels.
Audio CDs can be titled with 20 character names: up to 48 discs for the built-in transport and 100 discs for optional external CD changers. CD-Text is supported for discs that are encoded with it. MP3 playback has support for ID3 tags in ISO 9660 level 1 and 2 format, as well as Romeo and Joliet. A maximum of 32 characters will be displayed for file and folder names. MP3 folders and tracks can be scanned, playing the first 10 seconds of a track and moving to the next. Other transport controls for MP3 include random, repeat, and fast forward/reverse (with no audio output).