Now that I've had the unit a few months, I thought I would share my thoughts. First, although a number of people have complained about overheating (and it does get hot), I have watched nearly 100 DVDs and not had a single problem. The battery life is adequate (3 hours as advertised) which is fine for just about everything. However, I would definitely recommend getting a second battery ($150). For one, this is nice on long trips. More importantly however, it takes nearly 6 hours to recharge the battery--making it impossible to simply jack into an outlet during a layover and get a fresh charge (sigh). Finally, in comparing this to a laptop computer, I find that the display on the L50 is much brighter and crisper than that on my laptop (so crisp in fact, that if you look closely, you can sometimes see slight artifacts left by movie special effects such as wire removal in action shots). Also, there's no way I would be able to use my laptop and eat an in-flight meal at the same time (something that is easy with the L50).
My only complaints with the unit are the long battery recharge time (see above) and the fact that it is sometimes difficult to get enough headphone volume on noisy flights. I'm not sure if this is really a problem with the L50--movies seem to have a lot more dynamic variation than a music CD (and I suspect that listening to classical music on my discman would be equally difficult in this environment).
The only other minor gripe (which is not related to the L50 specifically ) is that non-anamorphic DVD's look absolutely terrible on the 16x9 widescreen. This is because a non-anamorphic widescreen disc shows up as a small letterbox inside a 4x3 square in the middle of the display (utilizing only a little more than 50% of the available display space). Although it is possible to blow this up to fill up the entire screen, the resulting image looks fairly pixelated due to the lower source resolution. The bottom line: make sure that you look for discs that are labeled as "anamorphic" or "enhanced for wide screen TV." Most new releases fall into this category although a few studios (such as Disney) still haven't gotten the point.
Overall, great unit. I love it.
