7 out of 7 people found this review helpful.
Best Up-converting DVD for the money
Date of Review: Jul 25, 2006
The Bottom Line: Amazing PQ, very reasonable price, good looks, and great compatibility with DVD-R, R, Divx, Xvid, and more. A MUST BUY for any discerning videophile waiting out the HD/Bluray battle.
This is the third upconverting DVD player I've owned.
The first was an LG, and second was a Toshiba. I liked the LG, it was from Australia and could play NTSC/PAL and Divx, and was region free. It was built well, even had memory card readers, and the video I thought was good. After using the next two players, I found the LG to have "muddy" or a softer picture. I would have kept this, but gave it to my parents as a gift.
The next was a Toshiba 4990. I would NOT recommend this player. The video was oversharped so much that it had halo effects around the edges (somewhat like a highly compressed JPG), and the decoder for MP2 and MP4 just wasn't very good. It had freeze ups, and I returned it.
Then I got this. I should say, I have no tried Divx/Xvid yet. So far the picture is AMAZING on my 30" HD CRT television. The PQ is up to that of the 1080i received from Charter Cable. In fact, I'd say it is better, because you don't have the pixelation that comes with compression from the cable company.
The controls are slow, but it hasn't really bothered me. As for the light others mentioned, I keep the DVD below my TV and it is not distracting after a minute of watching TV. I just wish they'd take them off ALL electronics, I hate it when they're in "standby" mode.
I'm running it in 1080i over HDMI and using Optical audio. Make sure you set the audio to Bitstream, as PCM is only 2 channels (this was set by default). I cannot comment on 1080p (I really hope to some day!). The DVD player automatically detected the HDMI cable and set it to 1080i HDMI on my non-samsung TV. I accidentally hit "progressive on" and it took a little playing with to get it back, but I chalk that up to my fault.
I will hopefully chime back in after trying some Xvids, but this far, it has been GREAT! It has the Faruja or whatever chip that is seen in $200+ DVD players. I believe this is the least expensive with that chip.
Good build quality, average remote, would recommend for sure.
UPDATED: On the Xvids/Divx, I had one that filled the screen, and I could not get it to go back to its actual aspect ratio. This was only on one of the Dvixs (I think it was a 3.11). Also, if you're MPG4 vids support only MP3 audio, you may have to switch it off Bitstream (used for 5.1) back to PCM.
Others have mentioned that it displays "HDMI Audio Not Supported" when on Bitstream and connected via optical audio and hdmi for video. However, there is an option to turn off display notices and it worked just fine on mine.
