Following on this thread started just before we bought our new Sony Bravia Z Series television set, I have a question about the new DVD player we just bought.
The new TV is high-definition, and we wanted a DVD player that could take advantage of the higher pixel count. We don’t want to shell out for a Blu-Ray machine at this point, as we figure those will come down a lot in price in the next few years.
So we got this Pioneer model in the title above. We’re a big fan of Pioneer DVD players; we feel they make the best ones. This model is their newest, and even though it’s not their most expensive one, every shop we checked with automatically pointed to it as the best one for what we were looking for, which was just straight DVD playing, no recording, no karaoke, no nothing else.
It does look great, too, and it was not very expensive. I remember we paid about 8500 baht for our old Pioneer player five years ago. That’s US$250 at the present exchange rate; don’t remember what it was back then, but certainly more than $200, maybe even $300. We expected to have to pay that much or more, but this unit was only 3300 baht! That’s $97. We looked at other players of all brands and were surprised at how cheap they all were. We were told that with the bad economy, everyone has cut prices. So we’re happy with this player.
Now my question. The shop threw in free of charge an HDMI cable to hook it up to our set with. The cable did not come with the player. The shop freely admitted this cable was the lowest quality there is, but I’ll tell you, it looks awfully good. I’d like to know if we did buy a slightly higher-quality cable, would we really notice that much of an improvement in picture quality? They have HDMI cables that cost as much as 10,000 baht ($294), with gold components! We don’t want anything that fancy, but they do have some supposedly still lower-quality cables for around 2000 baht ($59), and that’s probably what we would go for.
I was assured in the previous thread that I ripped myself off by buying expensive component cables, so I’m wondering if it would be worth upgrading the cable at all now. The picture really is good now as it is; just wondering if we really could make it better.
Oh, and one other thing. This model is so new that there was no English-language instruction manual with it. Only Thai. Grrr! We called the Pioneer service center in Bangkok, and they managed to come up with one and have mailed it to us. It never even occurred to us to ask, as every major appliance we’ve ever bought here has come with an English-language manual. I guess since the wife is Thai, the shop didn’t think to mention that. Pioneer told us it’s because this model is so new, but I’m assuming they sell it in English-speaking countries.