I recently boutght a Sony 51" rear-projection HD-TV, and I love it. Now, I want to squeeze the most performance I can out of my DVDs. But DVDs & players are alot more complicated than I thought. Upscaling? De-interlacing? Faroudja DCDi? Chroma bugs? Damn!! What’s a guy to do?
So, I come to the dope. I am prepared to make the traditional goat sacrifice in exchange for your advice; yea verily the sage wisdom of the learnéd.
I’m willing to spend up to $300, my viewing is about 50% anime, 25% movies & 25% TV (ie, Star Trek DVDs). What do you recommend?
And, kind of an aside - Will DVI give me a better picture than component video?
Have you found a DVD player with DVI? I just got a HDTV, LCD projection with 1280x720p native resolution. Razor sharp picture, I love it. Damn thing is actually incompatible with the DVI intarface in my cable box but that seems to be a non issue. HD cable and NTSC video from the DVD recorder are both coming through 3 component video and I’ll be damned if I can see an artifact that I can attribute to the interface. I do see some minor pixel “walking” with high contrast thigns like credit crawls and yard lines on football fields but I expect this with the upsampling and downsampling from 480i/p and 1080i sources. Anamorphic DVDs look astonishing through the component interface.
I’ve found a couple with DVI and/or HDMI over at the Cambridge Soundworks page.
I’m using a somewhat-cheap DVD/VCR combo right now. The component out does look a lot better than the composite I was using, but there seems to be a lot of combing. The player isn’t “progressive scan”, so I figured it was time to upgrade.
A little bit of research later, and I’m just a bit overwhelmed with the amount of info & apparent complexity of the question.
My recorder isn’t high end, an Ilo brand from Wally World but it is progressive scan. I’d be willing to bet that even a cheap progressive scan player might give you much better picture.
Are you sure that it’s incompatible? Your cable provider may not have enabled the DVI output on your cable box yet. You may want to check with them and confirm.
As for the OP, I’ve been hearing really good things about PC based home theater DVD players. “They” say that the playback quality will blow away sub-$1000 players, and if you have an extra PC laying around it can be done for fairly cheap.
A general rule of thumb for DVI and component is if you have a CRT based RPTV, DVI and component will look pretty much the same. If you have a LCD, DLP or LCoS RPTV then DVI will look better, depending on the quality of your source.
I get through the setup wizard and end up with a message that says my TV doesn’t support the digital interface, the message being generated by the cable box. Cox says the TV is incompatible with the SA box. Zenith says it’s the box because the TV is made to the newest DVI standard.
The site you want to check out for the best DVD player background info and advice is AVS forum (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=18). IMHO, the two hottest players right now are the upsampling ones from Sony (DVP-NS975V) and Panasonic (DVDS97S). They both have HDMI outputs and can output 480p, 720p and 1080i via HDMI. Please note that if your TV has a DVI input, you will need to buy a relatively inexpensive ($25-$30) adaptor. I recently upgraded my system to the Panasonic DVDS97S, and while there is an improvment over component, it isn’t huge.